


strike hard and true, crow (or I'll come back and haunt you)

by Hatice



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Dark Jon Snow, Horror, Identity Issues, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Supernatural Elements, Warnings May Change, of a sort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:40:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9824939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hatice/pseuds/Hatice
Summary: Death has come to bend the knee.





	1. shrill click of a cocked gun.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 "Your name is Jon Snow."

There was the howl of the wind. A smear of rust in his periphery, the red woman’s voice is even and temperate, repeating the words like a witch her spells. She has been trying to invoke him since he opened his eyes but he does not answer her.

Quiet as a heart tree, he lays. Black as dragon glass and hard as quartz are his lungs.

The words are heard and then they are tasted. He feels first with his teeth, a testing gnaw, curious to him. It rests, weighed on his rough tongue and he thinks – _weak_. Like milk-water in the mouth, like late summer snowmelt.

It tastes like the name of a boy, perhaps one on the cusp of becoming a man – but he is not a man and the boy is dead.

It is nothing like the bloody sharpness that wakes him, still welling between his teeth.

This is not his name. It does not deserve utterance.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

It was icy ravines so deep and dark they might have led into hell. Is fire feared? It is but one way to get warm. But memory –

When it gathers in him it is in a slow thaw, broken and sharded chunks of ice that meet and melt as they float away downstream to join the great black sea of what is lost.

A tall tower twisted in vines. A long blade, thin as a finger and _sharp_. The laughter of a boy with unruly hair, swooping on the shoulders of a giant.

Jon Snow might have had a family, might have loved, might have had a wilding woman once. The warm red thatch at the junction of skinny, tough thighs – skin freckled and spotted like the slim flanks of a deer. Breathless gasps lapping against the rocky walls of an underground place. _Who taught you that?_

She was not red like the red woman, for Jon Snow’s lover had had hair bright like hearty flame. The red woman is the colour of a bloodied knife sleek in the sleeve. The red of old blood, deep and dark.

There was another standing on the battlements, the proud tilt of her chin and a keeper of silences that withered Jon Snow away. Not his mother, never his mother. Then another singing the soft sweet songs, voice carrying gently through the corridors of a snow castle. The words are lost and silly, the songs had been about Knights and the Seven, and a King had taken her away.

This Jon Snow, kissed by fire and met by it at every turn. Yet cold, cold, _cold -_

Duty killed the first woman, his birth shamed and mocked the other, and the third was lost in lands Jon Snow would now never himself see. And the red woman…even in escaping the pyre he has failed the red woman.

For she’d meant to call back a man to life, only he was not a man. He was not Jon Snow.

He slips into the world like waking from sleep. Like a stillborn babe the scream does not gather in his lungs for that raw announcement performed by the newly damned – the cries that might shake the walls of the birthing chamber do not here exist. His breath is even, his blood runs circuit in him whether he wills it or no. The fire does not touch him; the light gives him neither comfort nor fear. He is indifferent, though aware of a certain grief, weak and phantom-like, like a lost limb.

Something that must feel.

He will never be warm again.

* * *

 

 

–

 

* * *

 A tall clever shadow on a cold yard once told him something approaching wise and called him Jon Snow. It was ice that passed through him, sharp and singing like the draw of a blade. It had cut him down and stolen his breath, the dizzying remembrance that no matter the wine, no matter the dark, no matter the place he would be rooted forever to this wound.

They gave him a name once, before – and he took it.

Jon Snow is a name that damns upon its utterance, they call motherless bastards Snow – a brand created to invite redress for its dishonour. Always shame.

A ruby, the largest such eyes as his will ever see, gleams in the hollow of the red woman’s throat. Her hair like the bloody flare of leaves, a heart tree gnarled and ugly, caught in the blow of summer light. Everything had been on fire.

The red woman repeats herself, voice calm and strange and with such measured enunciation. He has been awake for a little while, staring at the rotting roof, breathing in wet air through the moss of torn, punctured lungs. Dust and dirt hovering above him, spinning and floating, disappearing and reappearing in the flicker of the torch light like false and falling stars.

He stares up as if unseeing. Jon Snow had died with his eyes open, with dreams of a lost time coming through in useless snatches. Who he is now he cannot say. The woman has sat by his side repeating herself for a long time. Jon Snow, Jon Snow. He makes no move to answer, says nothing.

Nothing betrays her urgency, poised in her seat, except that she repeats herself and she tells him his name and he feels nothing except the rough, coarse wood of a table with one short leg, uneven, and the iciness beneath him and the sting and balm of damp, dank cold drafting over his nakedness.

He can hear the leap and stutter of her pulse, she leans forward and lightly purses her lips when he does not answer her. He does not know her very well, for not even Jon Snow had truly known her – but it is unusual, her face has always been closed and compressed. A well-guarded secret.

His hair is wet from where she had washed it, sopping still and every eight heartbeats a drop falls, pelting the icy pool beneath the table. It is loud as if it were water slipping down the stalactite of a cave, an underground place Jon Snow had never truly left. Bereft of warmth, of his red hearted, lively lover.

The red woman had cleaned and bathed him, she must have prepared his corpse. Thinking of it would be like trying to recall the hands of a phantom. Would a lover have treated him so gently?

He has no mother to compare her to, no memory of such a touch. A woman in a grey dress Jon Snow once dreamt up during a fever. In the morning the fever broke and the woman still did not even look at him.

In the back of his throat he can taste the sweat and salt of the red woman, his nose sharp, he can feel it hard like the back of his own teeth. Her deepening consternation, her dismay, her vulnerability and the fickle strength of her aliveness.

“What did you see?” she’d asked first. “Do you remember? What did you see?”

She was not a woman to beg, even in prayer there’d been a terrible pride in her, less like a penitent pilgrim and more like the bannerman of a fierce foreign invader. Her god was hungry, had made kindling of the singular weirwood at Castle Black, her god demanded answer and death. It was poor choice, between dying in the ice or dying in the flames – alive he will be called upon to heed both.

He does not answer her, so she speaks to him, or rather she thought she spoke to him, she was speaking to he who had already perished – to Jon Snow.

A weary man with grey in his beard had visited before and looked as though he might weep. The one they called the Onion Knight, he had looked weary and kind, someone who might have reminded him of Jon Snow’s father as he’d looked last.

The clasps on his shoulders had snapped in his hurry to tear off his cloak. He’d thrown the thick, scratchy wool over this cold body in perhaps some bid for warmth, or modesty, the desperate urge to offer something of one’s self – The Wall was the coldest place on earth but he did not need warmth like Jon Snow might have once needed and he cared as little about his nakedness as a wolf did.

Where was his King now? Did the joints of his left hand ache, was the cleaver sure, was it kind? Four dead sons. Does it ache the same as the loss of your fingers? How did one lose so much and live? Perhaps, like the mutilation of one’s hand, it was a thing to become accustomed to. Is his just and righteous King lost? Which leaves one more bereft? The loss of a man’s limbs, his blood, or his King? He’d held no gods but his crowned and false god, Stannis. The stink of grief is on such a man, deep and blackening like a cloud of ash or sleep –

It was rot and madness, the absurdity and cruelty of it. It was the burning weirwood and the weeping Wall, it was Mance on the pyre and a Baratheon’s promise of reinstating land that was not Jon Snow’s to hold – to be foresworn, to be disowned, to be taken. To be made, broken, forged – to shine true like steel and then snap over the knee like wicker. To be a saviour and then all at once no one. To be legitimised by men, yet given no name by his own father. To be the last Stark – or as close to one as was to be had in uncertain times. To lead men and love men and be betrayed. _You know nothing, Jon Snow_ – and that was right, Jon Snow had hung in empty void of it, knowing it more than he’d known anything else alive.

It was their fire gods and their olds gods and their seven, warring over wasteland, breaking men, breaking faith, no better than pretenders and lords, usurpers and crowns. No less blind.

Why fight? An Onion Knight has five less fingernails to clean, four less sons to honour, and one less King to fail. Why live? The clarity of it was like the walls of the glassgardens, blurry when close, when fogged by breath. To some men it is the only choice left to them. They nurtured in them a hope, forever certain that meaning would make itself apparent in the end… but there was no meaning, where this might make a man afraid it rid him of the feeling of the senselessness of living. Hollow and unwilling, Jon Snow is dead and _he_ must live instead.

Anger and grief are so apart from him, a well with an endless drop. There is black water there, still and untouched. It cannot provoke him. It is there, it is not even his. Both newborns and the dead were wrapped in such a way, he lay enshrouded in the cloth that smelt of the wet stables, in silence, in disparity. It was said that the Lord of Winterfell had brought his lady wife a gift when he came back from the war, bundled as such. In his own cloak had been a bastard babe.

The man waited and fretted like a helpless father, chewing down on his worry. He waited for him to speak. He waited for Jon Snow.

So the red woman spoke and the man with the missing fingers stood with the strained bowed vigil of a man fumbling for prayers long forgotten.

He could feel his pulse, aligned with the rumble and wheeze of the breathing Ghost – Jon Snow’s creature – his heart slipping above and beneath the beat of his, the loose, loping braid of blood, joining and separating and joining again. The plunge and soar of a needle, above and beneath, the drawing thread.

He closes his eyes, the direwolf’s great body curled beneath the table. They have halved between the two of them now but one life instead of two, one poorly patched soul. They were the rented black wool cloak, shredded and mended, sewn together by death and blood, by scarlet silk from Asshai. _It was the greatest treasure she had, and her gift to me._

Black and red, both the Lord Commander and the King Beyond the Wall had been black and red. Traitor and betrayed, burned, sacrificed, bloodied. _My old cloak was fit for burning now_.

They could have let Mance keep his cloak, Jon Snow had thought, the one the wildling had woman patched with strips of crimson silk. If they were to burn him, burn him with that dear gift that had made his heart so tender as to betray and forsake his vows –

It was ferocious and grim and righteous, that which had made Jon Snow pick up his bow. There had been a wildling’s honour in his own then. To defy Kings and kill kindly.

Perhaps Jon Snow had been killed kindly.

He closes his eyes but does not sleep and does not dream. The prayers spoken and unspoken, needless and unheard, carry over him like a shroud of gossamer, like the gentlest, smallest child’s exhalations, _I am not Jon Snow._

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

There are deep gouges in this body – in _him_. Still gored with dried blood, they look angry against the wintry pale rest of him. He’d stopped counting after six, the air had smoked like the hiss of a blacksmith’s blade through water, like the whorls of a warm bath, like the springs in Winterfell where a boy named Jon Snow might have once played with his half-brothers and sisters.

“You are a man of the Night’s watch. You are the Lord Commander. You are lord Eddard Stark’s bastard son. You are – “ she pauses, for the first time she sounds nearly troubled. “You are the Prince that was promised, Azor Ahai – ”

_There is blood in my mouth._

His body cold like ice and alabaster, cold like the dead. _There is blood in my mouth._

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

Tears had seeped along the bent line of Wick Whittlestick’s sorry broken nose. _For the Watch_ , he’d whispered over and over again. He’d been the first to swipe at Jon Snow, the clumsy beginner of a messy end. _For the Watch_ , he’d whispered and killed him even as he wept.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

Jon Snow is the name of a boy perhaps on the cusp of becoming a man. Jon Snow who thought he was not afraid of death, who thought that he had wanted to die at least with a sword in his hand, fighting his father’s killers – but they killed him like how they’d killed Jeor Mormont, cowards with knives in the dark.

Jon Snow was dead. His back hit the snowy ground and his wounds had smoked, he’d seen his brothers and sisters and everything lost. A man who had loved and who was betrayed.

This Azor Ahai the red woman speaks of is a legend, a prophet in the faith of her god R’hllor. A Lord of Light. He clasped a flaming sword and darkness would flee from him.

But there are no Gods, old or new, or fiery enough to breach the black. It illuminates nothing. It is a sad, pretty song.

He cannot be Azor Ahai even if he is not Jon Snow, for he is not fire but a thing stillborn in that very same dark, still and dead. There is nothing between the close and open of the eyes. Nothing that warrants breath or fear.

Both these two were men, both these two had gods. Men died. Afraid, Brave. Jon Snow had cried and begged for Gods. Azor Ahai was a promise made to comfort the absence of them, the cruel false promise of an intercession that would never arrive. Men die.

“You are Jon Snow – “

His jaw moves, his throat aches with iron and rust. “Where are they?” She stills for the first time stunned that he speaks, perhaps she’d thought he would not be able to.

He braces his palms across the splintered table, his wounds hum and split, blood wells and trickles across his midriff as he pushes, rising upright. Her breath catches and her composure is the skirt whose hem has caught on a jutting nail. There is a tear, deepening, opening – her knuckles are white. But there is blood in her, he knows, he can hear it. She is alive. The unsteady, flickering flame of the life in her – the years have reduced her, this has reduced her. A woman of pyres and burned men, her eyes now young and finally uncertain, like the flick and wick, the violent shiver of the candles in the drafty hovel. _Men die._

He is not a man.

There are no Starks left and he was never that, though he’d hoped to die like one – in some ways he got his wish, Jon Snow’s half-brother betrayed at a wedding, stabbed through the heart. Lord Eddard beheaded and without friends. Jon Snow has no one to avenge him

The gods can never be real because if they were then they would be deaf or cruel, in some ways it is better to know the truth of it now, though he does not know whether it would comfort Jon Snow.

Bastard, oathbreaker, motherless, friendless, and damned for all of his short and miserable life – further damned to be disgraced in death. He who’d stood in the shadows and dared not speak his true name out of shame. Jon Snow lived in that name and died in the white fall of it, killed by his brothers.

Allister Thorne, Bowen Marsh, Othel Yarwick, Olly – _These are the only names that matter._

“Where are they?”

The Red Woman stands, her hands balled by her sides as if she is struggling not to raise them. A defence against an unreasonable man or a feral beast, it is strange, it is as if he were now something suddenly dangerous to her. She nearly frowns. “My lord?”

"The men who killed Jon Snow," he says, his throat raw still. "Where are they?"

"The men who -" he hears her exclaim in whisper as the door opens, all at once the winds hurl in, keening and shrieking like a woman freshly widowed. “They killed _you_. It is you, _you_ – “

The flames whip and the shadows shake, the man in the doorway looks upon him, struck dumb. Relief and horror floods the Onion Knight’s face, his exhaustion sweet and his hope breaking him, looking upon a dead man he thinks to find direction and deliverance in.

He rises, and caring not for how Ser Davos’ face falls, says “Give me a blade.”

This was the least he could do for sorry Jon Snow.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

A group of wildlings stood by the gates, their furs blotted in blood – he had scented it even from afar, _fresh_. There are more than twenty of them gathered, in the inner ring leaning on their spears are eight of their strongest and the last left called upon to lead or at least in as much a capacity as wildlings would allow to be led.

The rest are women, children and the elderly, faces sallow and near skeletal. They look at him with the sunken eyes better placed in the heartwood, their starving young crouched on one knee and their broken spears lain on the other.

Day will soon rise and the wildlings watch him along with the rest of the living.

It was nearly like slipping into the body of an animal; a hawk, a bear… but when he’d stepped out in Jon Snow’s corpse there was no mind there but his own and the faint echo of Ghost’s.

He stepped out in Jon Snow’s furs, Jon Snow’s buckled sword and it was then that a man with wiry orange hair – Jon Snow’s man – sprung up from where he’d been speaking with a host of other Free Folk. They had been crowded like a sorry lot of beggars, like blind bats with their shoulders huddled against scrawny necks, left hung in the dark until they would see their Jon Snow. They could then move, become alive, their faces shine with with fear, expectation and brittle hope, pale and needy as starvation.

He’d stepped towards him; arms open as if to embrace him. Faltering, he blinked the ice from his lashes and then gone grim and sad, “Crow?”

He had not answered. The man came closer and took him by his shoulders carefully, “We thought – ” his fingers tense and tightened, searching for hold. “Aye, you’re alright, aren’t ye?”

He does not answer, this man is familiar, his frank eyes honest. In Jon Snow’s memory he had always been there in battle, darting through the periphery like a fox, shedding blood for Jon Snow where he could never kneel.

It is the Onion Knight who clears his throat, “You must excuse the Lord Commander, Tormund.” He lies with the carefully smooth innocuousness of a man who though well-intentioned has been too long unused to speaking falsities. “He’s still out of sorts.”

The man – _Tormund_ , the Onion Knight has said it with tact, to remind him of the name. Attentive, he has after all been a dead king's aide – does not look away from him, his stubborn brow pulled, his hold does not ease. He stares at him, looking for Jon Snow. When he lets go it is suddenly, with the painful abruptness of a man who has realized overly-late the truth of death.

He turns past this man and towards the clearing ahead. The other wildlings watch him warily, the silence of them instead full of the whistle of the wind. Inside the shed it had beat against the walls and howled to be let in, the door had opened and it had been like screams. Then just as quickly it had quietened, like the kitchen cats losing interest once sure of invitation.

It isn’t hard to guess their sudden trepidation, for there it stands unfinished ahead of him. Stacked over each other rough shod are piles thrown together of such mismatched pieces it takes a while to make out that the dead bark of trees, the dried nearly withered shrubs of weeds, the rotten chairs and the old, sodden beams of the collapsed tower for what they are.

Pages flutter across his boots, the blotty runes of volumes that have kept in the library for hundreds if not thousands of years. Tormund shuffles next to him, offering gently. “It was the only tender we could get, they’d locked every room to us. Your book crypt had the flimsiest door, so.”

“It’s packed too tight,” The kindling too wet, too green. "Did you mean to smoke me or burn me?”

Tormund cracks a rough grin, if watchful. “Is Jon Snow a ham?”

The wildling is careful at taking heart in what might only have been misread levity, the hope a cautious thing that does not dare become more than an ember. He does not answer that, he does not return the sorry smile. He closes his eyes, the cold crisp and clear against his face. The sun will rise in a few hours, the Wall is weeping blue tears. The kindling flutters unlit, once precious to Jon Snow with their written history, if only for that they were dear to another dearer to him.

_The Free Folk saw their king burn._

It is the first true feeling to return to this body that feels real, for looking at it makes his fingertips burn, hiss, sliced through by the loose of an arrow poorly fletched. He had lowered his hand and blood had beaded onto the planks, each drop like the spit and steam of water landing on a hot copper pot. His breath had plumed, a snaking, curling rush of frost and he had not cared for Stannis Baratheon’s baleful glare. He had not cared for a King’s wrath.

Mance Rayder’s head had lolled and Jon Snow had only cared that the screaming had stopped. He’d killed their King and it had been an act of kindness – at the time it was the kindest thing he could have ever done for them.

They did not forget. This is Jon Snow’s pyre, gathered together by these men and women and children.

Jon Snow would bow over, weeping into his knees to know that he would have been at all mourned.

But he is not that man, he cannot die – he is no longer tender nor kind.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

He goes to the traitors where they are assembled. None of them have anything sweet to say. Wick Whittlestick breaks into even noisier sobs at the sight of him and the yard is filled with it. If he were a man it would have torn at him.

The rigging is ready, noose and all. Alliser Thorne kneels in the snow in its shadow, looking disgusted but fearless and unashamed. “Will you kill me for doing my duty? Do it then. You were Lord Commander, you destroyed everything this watch stood for.”

He stands before them and feels such little himself, not fear, not anger – it has been swept out of him, dulled and rounded like the treacherous steps of the Nightfort, carved into the Wall in ice older than death. “Traitor.” He utters, quiet and without inflection. “Conspirator, murderer.”

“It is _you_ who betrayed your vows, _bastard_.”

He watches the spit land near his feet. Alliser Thorne was a once a man knighted, someone Jon Snow could have admired. Knights were meant to have honour, chivalry, to be courageous and true to their word.

Was Aerys Targeryan already mad when he charged such a man to hold the Seven, to be just and honourable? Knights were meant to be as strong and fierce as their war horses. But mocking always, bitter and humourless, Alliser Thorne had had enough poison in him to fell an entire calvalry.

He kept his vows and trained the Night’s Watch but the men he armed hated him for his brutal adherence to brutality. No one could deny that he had been a good ranger, that he bled and killed for the Night’s Watch better than any man. Was he already sour when he was knighted? Or did he grow more bitter as Aerys grew more mad?

There had been no kindness in him except that he would call Jon Snow a bastard before he would ever call him his brother.

Once upon a time he must have knelt, not unlike how he kneels now. On the pale marble of a grand hall instead of frozen hard ground, a blade resting on his shoulder instead of threatening his throat, anointing. He must have worn armour polished to catch the shine of sunlight, in a sept of a thousand glass windows, in a hall like the inside of a jewellery box. The gold and light of summer might have caught on him like it might catch the back of a wave, a diamond. He might have been young and fresh of face, he might have been but a boy, he might have even looked like Robb.

But the man who stands before Alliser Thorne is not a King, he is a Dead Thing, a Ghost. Men of the Night’s Watch wear black, grim and worn like the wet, sorry plumage of battered crows. There was neither grace nor beauty here, only duty, only death. Freefolk and fearful men, not courtiers or grand, good lords, there is no sept, no god. The frost is bitter and blue, and neither of them will ever see summer again.

 _Bastard_ , Ser Alliser spat. He had been the first to mockingly call him _Lord Snow_. As Master at Arms he had been slim and sinewy– strong and cruel but his knees were an old knight’s knees too. They must have hurt like an old man’s.

 _Traitor_ , he’d said. There are no more oaths left to betray, none that he had taken himself – if Jon Snow made vows then he had long fulfilled them, he died and now his watch was ended. It is done.

“You killed the Lord Commander so you could become him.” A cool, unshakeable certainty accompanies his words. There is no sorrow in this, no anger, no grief – there exists only to be done that which is deserved. “You coveted, you led a mutiny, do you now believe yourself righteous?”

“You would paint me as usurper? Like the fat king your traitor father fought for? Aye, I took your mantle, I did it for the sake of the Night’s Watch, I did it to spare them a weak and feeble turncloak who would take in the same savages that murdered our black brothers. But swing your sword, Jon Snow – there were men who’d been in the Watch for nigh on thirty years, grown toothless and never complained but Jeor Mormont raised _you_ up quicker than your whore-mother pulled up her skirts for your traitor father, because he was a fine lord and you were a fine lord’s get, bastard or no. You graceless _cunt_ , I would have followed you if you had had sense enough to listen, to follow the true way, but it is done, do you want me to weep? I fought and I lost. Kill me, it is done.”

He looks down at Allisor Thorne, a sworn knight. His palm cracks when he opens it powdery frost has already lined the edges of his gloved fingers. Jon Snow’s gloves. These - these are all Jon Snow’s things, these are Jon Snow’s enemies and Jon Snow’s wildlings and everything – everything, _all_ of it is Jon Snow’s. This sword too, valyrian steel. Much too fine for a bastard and yet, _Jon Snow’s._

Jon Snow would call for a block or make use perhaps of the rigging that’s been put up – they expect there to be a hanging. They have anticipated and acted accordingly, Jon Snow’s men. Jon Snow would have wanted to be his father’s son, would have wanted to parse out death like a Stark. Just and unflinching, a good, broad swing by a grim, just man on a green hill, with an ancestral sword on ancestral lands.

Wick’s wailing goes on, gaining pitch – it’s a shameful way to die. He blubbers that he is sorry, that he does not want to be killed – his eyes nearly bug out of his face to see his executioner unravel the leather belt that holds Jon Snow’s bastardised Mormont blade. For a moment there is relief in Wick’s eyes.

The snowy earth gives a puff the colour of pulverised bone as scabbard, blade and belt drop to the ground. Bowen Marsh inhales sharply through his nose, eyes bracingly closed – perhaps he is praying – and Alliser Thorne keeps his head up, meets the gaze of a man he murdered, righteous.

Righteous and wronged, he thinks grimly, you’d love to die like this, wouldn’t you?

Tormund frowns when turned to, scowling curiously when his sides are searched. He raises a brow but it does not take long for him to understand. The wildling admits to this examination, raising his arms. He looks at his brethren with an expression of disbelief and piqued interest once he sees what the Lord Commander is getting at.

When he turns back to the men Wick gutters out a broken sob and is ignored. _Mercy_ – he screams, _please. By the Gods -_

He circles around Alliser Thorne to stand behind him, hair black and struck through with grey he grabs a handful of it and pulls, tilting the sworn knight’s head back.

Alliser Thorne is looking up with his narrow black eyes. Jon Snow had seen stars blurred through the fog and smoke in the blackest night of his life. He slants his own head back to see what Alliser Thorne sees. The dawn is a pale and dim blue, like the dyed rough spun dresses a Northern woman might have worn, sensible and lovely and cold. His throat is bared to it, aches as if beneath the gentle and dangerous graze of a lover’s hands, the scour of her nails.

Alliser Thorne’s eyes are full of cool anger, dry. His jaw so tight it might as well have been bound and if his breath shakes as it leaves him, it is only but once.

The bone is neatly carved, worn in where another’s hand has deepened the groove. “You took the Lord Commander’s mantle for your own,” The dawn sears him, closing his eyes against that stinging cold he hears himself speak. “I will forgive you,” He savours it like pain, like it is the lost sun warming his face instead. “Aye, I forgive you and gift you this. If I don’t begrudge you your quick knives then surely you can’t really begrudge me this gift, for it is freely given.”

His words are as warm as night is dark, his fingers wind near gentle, his wrist twists idly but his knuckles close. There was once a time when he would reach down and do this to someone else. Someone Jon Snow had loved, had died loving more than he’d ever loved anyone in the world. He remembers hair dark like his own and tangled as a bird’s nest. His heart stops, the blood jars in him and in the core of his core there is a dangerous sound - like the crack of thunder, that which would split him, the noisy break and rumble of iced-up shores –

His chest hollows out. He opens his eyes. His exhale knifing the air, he is nothing once more.

It takes a while before he can return to it, before he can proceed. When he leans down to Thorne so he might find his ear, he tugs and comes near as if he were sharing with him a dear, delightful secret. “Take it. Please, m’lord it is yours. Only I insist – and you will agree on what a fitting thing it is indeed – you see, for if you take the Lord Commander’s mantle,” he murmurs, “You must take his pyre too.”

Alliser Thorne makes a shallow gasp but his wrist has already dragged, the wildling blade moving in one fluid, sure movement slitting his throat. Olly pale as a wight but with his blood a red slash blooming down his front, the reddest over the yard. Bowen Marsh curses furious, calls him traitor’s bastard, frothing and thrashing. The sharp, sour smell of piss is already in the air by the time he moves to sobbing, trembling Wick, reaching him before Alliser Thorne has even finished slumping forward into the snow, throat gushing.

He moves easily, efficiently, naturally. He takes Wick’s oily hair and feels blood burst and spray against his palm, the knife draws deepest across this one, for a moment it had sawn over bone. Wick falls over. As does the next man, and the next, and the next.

The yard is completely silent by the time he is done. Unplanned yet quicker than he could have ever expected. The tendons in his arm ache like they have been knotted through with twine and _pulled_. He should be shaking from his hands to his shoulders but instead he stands so tremendously immobile, stilled in the red slurry of snow melting beneath the warm blood of men, soaking his boots. He does not even breath hard.

In the gather of onlookers an old woman stands out to him, her jaw hard and her eyes cold and she does not flinch. The red woman is inscrutable once more, in her thin silks she raises her chin, her spine steels, something decided. Ser Davos stands wooden but his features are closed, no stranger to an execution but not expecting it of Jon Snow. It is justice, though perhaps more direct than Jon Snow’s.

 _Jon Snow, Jon Snow, Jon Snow_ – like an endless chant. Their looks, their sweet, sick hope – it breaks in him, white hot like the centre of a star, there is a madness in him then, long clawed and vicious, raining blows on him. He grabs wildly and suddenly at the furs and rips, tearing them from him, he tears as if at his own throat, his hands shake disattaching this burden, this skin that is not his.

Each thing he discards lands heavily over Jon Snow’s belt and blade. He disrobes until he is standing only in his breeches and broiled leather baldrick, in his worn bloodied boots.

And then the air is bright and sharp in his throat, his body trembling as if naked and bared. The office discarded, the deed done. Jon Snow is a pile of wet clothes and an old bear’s sword. He takes the air, he breathes, he braces himself for a long, still moment before he re-emerges once more. The shakes are gone, his breath is level, and he will allow himself no dead boy’s agony.

He brings back Tormund’s dagger and the wildling accepts its return with a look of bewilderment. The bloody business is over. He turns to the rest of them.

In a voice measured to command he declares, “Jon Snow was one of you." He swallows, blood and rust, blood and rust. "He took his oaths and he died for them. His watch has ended.”

He waits for any of them to deny him but no one speaks. He considers their silence, “Burn the bodies.” He says stiffly to no one and makes off, not caring to see if they heed.

He has given to Jon Snow the deaths owed. He will be gone before the day even breaks.

Inside he sits heavily where he’d lain. When Ghost rouses himself from the shadows it is to approach slowly, to put his great head on his master’s knee, his mute throat shakes as if from a whine, plaintive as a pup.

His fingers uncurl from gripping all of the nothing he’d been born with, dead men and bastards alike all have the same empty hands. Ghost’s eyes are red as the sap of the weirwood, peering up at him.

 _I am not Jon Snow_. A Dead Thing bows his head. A Dead Thing is turning hands over and giving to the maw of beasts his bloodless palms to lick clean.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 


	2. I dared, made flesh, to want my own two hands, my blood luck back

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

_I saw him…_

_I saw him in the flames._

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

There’s been a mutiny, brother turning against brother while he lay.

The man recounting these events flashes his teeth in a wan grin, an ill-fit for his long and dour face.  He is not much older than Jon Snow but his features are already lined by a suffering misery he has with exasperation bourne and nurtured throughout his life. His hair is grey like an old man’s and he has the flat, tired stare of one with few expectations except to expect to be made bored or dead. A smart man predisposed to gloom as his first instinct rather than the poison that is rage.

They had kept the body in the maester’s quarters. The room above is the rookery, did he know that? Did he remember? Already they say that the ravens slammed themselves against the boards screaming as a dead man took his first breath. It’s an exaggeration as most stories are of course.

_That’s foolery though. We barred the rookery as soon as they’d found you, not willing to chance… well, kept you here so we could keep an eye out but mostly because it was the closest hovel to your body – which is heavier than it looks might I add._

_Thorne would have killed the ravens to prevent news of the mutiny from passing the wall. Then again, likely he’d have ended burning the wooden keep with you in it anyway – to get to both. It wasn’t very clever but you were dead and you were heavy. It was…the closest place we could drag you to, Jon._

The man recounts the events with a sharpness of wit, grey and slow as his tone is. There is an intelligence to him that belies his dull demeanour…but he cannot be listened to for this is only but one of those many who have come to measure and court a corpse they call Jon Snow.

Thorne’s faction had not been so large, taking advantage of the reticence of men yet unclear on whether or not they protested murder enough to join the wildlings they too hated. The fight never broke beyond the boundaries of Castle Black.

Alliser Thorne had promised Ser Davos supplies, a good horse and free pass if he agreed not to interfere and to leave the matter well enough alone.  He grew impatient waiting for Ser Davos’ agreement.  _Words are wind_ , the onion knight had accepted to consider the offer and promised his answer by nightfall. How very absurd these two men were in their performance, both knowing they would inevitably be dangerous to one another _._

 _Words are wind._ It was truest then when the men of the Night’s Watch proved no longer able to honour their words.

The man speaks with a dry and raspy voice, it nearly sooths. Black and worn leathers had flapped around his skinny shoulders as he’d wrestled the doors of the stout wooden keep shut on the draft that had followed him. He had brought a stool with him, set it at the table and sparing none of the ruin around him even a glance, proceeding to speak to the dead with familiarity and ease, with a near refreshing lack of awe. Torn parchment lies between them, there is a shamble of a bookshelf sloped against the walls and the blood in the crags of the floor is still wet when Ghost noses it.

The fight started when the mutineers decided they had waited long enough and they came, intent on burning whatever remained of Jon Snow’s allies. The wildlings took up their spears – doors barred and doors kicked in. They’d held around that little hut where their corpse lord lay, steel flashing like tongues, like silver flames crowning that dead heart.

There were few casualties for there were few willing to die for Alliser Thorne and his small band of traitors, few willing to face Wun-Wun for the honour of a murderer.

The traitors were apprehended and when news struck that Jon Snow had retaken breath men feared too much the darkening world to test the truth of it. _It killed the fight in them._

Hunched there and rather unbothered by the silence that still answers him, the man spread his hands and he moulded his mouth and he blew across his palms as if he were knocking down men of straw lined in the gored seams of them. _It wasn’t so bad, far as uprisings go. Didn’t you hear it?_

Only the wind, only the snow.

_The noise, the storm, Jon - all that yelling and screaming…_

He is still silent, he will never answer truly to this name. Never.

 _Is that so?_ And his face is as gloomy as his eyes are wry _.  Thought for certain it’d wake you._

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

When he lifts his head Alliser Thorne’s blood is still fresh on the snow. He begins moving, gathering supplies; the worn discarded cloaks of dead brothers, a knife of dragonglass and a sword taken from one of many who alive could have had use for them, but only if alive. The sword is one that needs sharpening but it is good enough steel, good enough for him.

Men give him wide berth, then disappear. Ghost does not leave him, following his master through the long tunnels beneath the Wall, from room to room, waiting in the doorways of every place they enter and not moving from there until the room is to be left.

He will loot from the dead what he needs for he is of them. He does not go up the wooden stairs to that other place. He takes nothing from the Lord Commander’s rooms, he takes nothing that was Jon Snow’s.

Soon enough he swings his pack over his shoulder and ignoring the burn and pull of his wounds, he walks out into the snow.

The sun has come up and offers that poor, blue illumination that scarcely differentiates it from night. The snow has stopped only having half-covered the snow already muddied and bloodied the night before. The grounds are nearly empty for the men of the Night’s Watch have convened somewhere else – it’s nought to do with him, he decides. It’s suspicious that they’ve left him alone and he is no fool. It’s only a matter of time before they make demands of him again.

This is an underwater place. Quiet and blue, nearly a dream. He finds himself stopping, suspended. He waits, aware of the breath in his lungs in a manner that is too present, the clench of his fists, the weight on his back. He waits.

Jon Snow alive or dead, there was no place in the world for a bastard. His body once sang and ached for warmth but now it is as if the very frost lines his veins, hollowing the marrow from him. He can neither imagine nor desire warmth, nor trust safety or rest.

His feet uncurl their roots and take him without being compelled, he walks as if asleep. It is almost a dream, quiet and blue. When he comes to himself it is to see that he stands beneath the awning of a small, rickety keep.

It is silent, uninterrupted by the cry and caw of crows. He sees the destroyed remants of the single bookshelf that had held this poor place together and the winds must have moved for the door shuts behind the direwolf and yet neither one of them look back to watch for its ghostly hand.

He wades deeper, walking in the shadowy imprints of a previous phantom. Ink runs beneath his fingertips, the paper like an odd, scratchy caress.

The floor is scarred from where they tried to drag the great weirdwood chair, it sits aside from the table, the little spared from becoming tinder – the red woman had sat there, calling him out of the dark while they were outside building pyres.

The chair creaks beneath him, his supplies lean against the leg of the table. He does not move for a long time.

He is weary. A dead man returning to his crypt – it is a sorry crypt, familiar to him. The ravens above him do not caw, have no singing to do though he can hear them stir like children rearranging themselves in sleep. Their singing is always an ugly sound – they cannot croon like other birds for their language is shrill and terrible. _Snow_ , was often the shriek, _snow, snow, snow._

_And she never sung you the song o’ the winter rose?_

Snow is the only song North of the Wall, it is no sweet mother’s hymn – it is a promise, a portent, the only certain thing. The crow’s songs are ugly but they are true. _An evil name_ , a bastard name. Snow is all we know, it is _winter_ –

And winter is _death._

He was weary, Death was. Things had broken Jon Snow, names and vows. Honour, duty and a cold, ferocious fear.

There is only an absence now, which itself is the wound. No living dear to Jon Snow for his shade to seek haunting, not here – not even in this room which is familiar to him, which had been precious, which he did haunt when he was alive. Someone made this room feel like a home, this wet hovel of rotting wood and the dank must of bird shit….It had been a home to Jon Snow.

The South would be warm, he’d heard. _South_ , even the word in its singularity seemed a myth, the name of some imagined fantasy that could not be. More ridiculous than Bael the Bard, less tangible than mist, as alien as summer. He should go South.

But summer is done, perhaps it has been for a long time and though his mind murmurs this word, his body will not take him, his arms will not move. He sits very still in the weirwood chair that overlooks that scoured table and the crows do not sing him answers or prophesize, the wind can only croon. He has slowed to stillness, the world for a moment indulges and slows too. There is no more time, no hour –  Ghost curls away in some shadow of the crypt. _South_ , Jon Snow might have dreamed. He who would have foresworn himself to go galloping after his brother, full of heroic imaginings and heroic grief, off to battle monsters and avenge their father, to be just, to be righteous – to stand by a true Stark like the wolves who guarded the old Kings of Winter, to perhaps be worthy.

Both betrayed, both slain. They would not find one another ever again these small, foolish children. The snowflakes had been melting into the rich red crown of him and it was the last time – always the last and the only time forever. Gored on the tusks of glory, in darkness and in terror, boys who were no more. Brothers never to embrace one another again, not even in death. There was no land beyond to meet in.

Who had done the lying, or done it better than themselves? They would beg for tales and pretend they were those figures in legends, wooden swords and bold, announcing cries. _I am Aemon the Dragon Knight! I am the Lord of Winterfell!_

And Old Nan leaning forward, breathing words in a gust of blue, frost tinged magic winding through like ice dragons, rattling the coverings on the windows, through the hair wasting from her scalp and spoke of blind Symeon Star-eyes, putting sapphires into the empty sockets where his eyes once were and cutting down two men with one spin of his long, bladed staff.

_Monsters can never pass the Wall. So long as the Wall stands strong and the men of the Night’s Watch are true._

None of it was true, the only ice-dragons that existed were a constellation of stars some whimsical fool had named.  Symeon never saw hellhounds, never – there were monsters, there was the Wall, but no one was true.

There is no reward, there is no reckoning, there is no justice and no punishment, there is no Answer. Jon Snow used to dream terrible dreams about the Kings of Winter watching him with their granite eyes, so vivid had been his imaginings, borne from these lies and so absolute his terror, the poor fool. They are all stone, only stone.

Was he now angry? Should he avenge himself upon the world now?

 _South_ , it rings hollow. _South_ , but he sits instead, not moving for a long time.

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

“The mutiny is squashed, there is no more time left to linger.”

The dour faced man of the Night’s Watch had left the stool, Ser Davos had taken his place. He had stayed for a while, speaking, unperturbed by the silence that answered. Then he too had been silent, and shared it with him in a peaceful, unasking way. He had begged his leave, the hour approaching for him to patrol the top of the wall lest he be late in relieving the brother who waited for him who might sleepwalk off the edge otherwise.

He had brought the stool but Ser Davos had brought tinder and coal. He has taken up where Ed Tollet has left off, just as much as Ed Tollet means to take up the patrol above. _They mean to circle me in turns, in shifts._

Ser Davos had come in with the demeanour expected of a man who had lost his children and his King and much else, that was to say that he had a stony face but sad, stricken eyes. As if what he saw troubled him and injured him, as if Jon Snow too had been some child of his.

He was careful, attending the grate and suffusing the keep with a poor glow and poor warmth. He fed the fire, waiting for it to strengthen but it would not take as it might have done a long time ago. Winter was already here, eerie and absolute, it would only deepen, and no hearth, no matter the tinder, would be able to fight it as well as was wanted. Ser Davos had given up and sat where the last courtier did, taken place there awkwardly, rubbing his disfigured hands, trying to bear the silence as well as Ed Tollet had, until he could be silent no more.

“Are you listening? The Night’s Watch needs its leader else all is lost. You are the Lord Commander - ”

“The Lord Commander is dead.” He says, it is abrupt, for it is the first thing he has said in hours. They have murdered and made a martyr of Jon Snow and now think to hold him to this? “Let them vote for their man.”

“They want _you_ present.”

“They wanted Jon Snow dead and he obeyed. I am not half so obliging.”

Ser Davos temples riddle and his mouth quivers and thins, it was some great emotion he struggled to master then – a beggar in his poor worn down clothes, his features sunken in by time and grief. He is to be pittied. “Do you…Do you not _care?_ The Free Folk have relied on you to keep them safe, the men of the Watch don’t dare think of you as anything less than a God or a demon – but they have no wish to disobey you, or to be led by anyone else. All here fear or love you, either way all men alike worship you – you are back from the _dead_ , seven hells! Do you think to turn away from them and to be turned away from? You _are_ to be Lord Commander.”

“Only a sworn brother can be Lord Commander.”

“Your oaths – “

“Oaths were served and honoured to _completion_ , I have taken no oaths.”

Of course the men had convened, this he had suspected and known. Tollet had made no mention of it and asked nothing of him, he had only arrived at some undiscernible hour to make his voice lap against the rickety walls. That had been a sort of sleep too.

Ser Davos heaves a bereaved sigh, gusting like the noisy rumble of a bear. The time could not be discerned either, when he came in. Was it still day? Had night sloped in? What does a dead man know or care?

The onion knight’s shoulders collapse, a shamble of a man staring unseeing. It’s a long time before he says anything. “Where do you mean to go? South? Do you even know?”

 _Where no soul can claim me, where I am no one’s but my own._ But he felt the cold settle in him in a way nothing could shift and knew he was tied still, to much that not even death could sever. He was empty of will or desire, the heart of him scrubbed empty. Would he were a bird, a nesting thing – but he is so empty at times he can hear the wind whistle through him.

There would never again exist a home.

“You say you are not Jon Snow but I…I must advise you as if you are. You have been wounded and betrayed but he is still within you, he must be if his memories are. He isn’t dead not truly and even if he were – even then I still owe it to Jon Snow to make sure he does not dishonour himself.”

“I owe Jon Snow nothing.”

“Don’t you?” Ser Davos snaps, and for a moment looks as though he might weep from exhaustion. Then he takes a breath, marshalling himself, imploring. His breath shakes “Don’t you, truly? What moved you then to take those lives? A nameless, empty man cares nought for the vengeance of his vessel. No, you _know_ that you lie. You know that you speak it all falsely. The way you move, everything you have done since coming to…to do for him what you have done, what you have so viciously _done_ …It seems that you owe Jon Snow a great deal.”

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

“Ghost,” the red woman had called once, the word a song itself. “To me.” And the direwolf had deserted his master as if he were nought but a stranger, and gone to her side.

That was what a name was good for, a fine hook twined out of music and magic. He’d once been in a crowd of brothers she’d been speaking to, her sermon called up demons and fiery, hungry gods but his head was clogged with the scent of anise and cloves, his ears caught on the rasp of her silks, his heart a slow, lazy pulse in his throat and his soul swaying away from his body.

 _Jon Snow,_ she repeats, pulling on twine to jerk the tooth that clawed into the meat of him. There was no hook to pull. He was not the boy, he was not this ghost.

She smells of sharp citrusy soap, the an angry half of peach. A sweetness, with the undercurrent of something too overripe it begins to rot, but his teeth are grooved to the metal and rust of his own blood. He smells her cold sweat, sees the wet stain of snow on her dress. She used to glide along the fields like a fairy over water but now he has seen the print of her feet in the snow, a firmer step for a woman trying to find steadiness were once it was all but ascertained.

Her faith has been shaken, the fires of her open to the wind. Her skin is warm still, like glass left in the sun, something that might quickly take to chill but it is not the furnace and frightening heat of holy fire.

Perhaps she is like him, some magic has divided her and eaten of her. Like Ser Davos who loses his fingers and his sons and his kings – no longer invincible and quite afraid were a dead thing is not.

“Jon Snow,” she whispers, a weak spell. Nothing about her has ever been weak. Nothing about her has ever sounded like begging, her knees are not made to touch the earth, her beauty not made to fade, her soul not made to be lost to mortal fears like any living man.

She trusted completely in the power of her god but could no longer trust herself. Her powders and smoke, it makes her little different from a magician or a fraud. Were she might have reached her red god, she now clutches at him. Her faith had strengthened, but her doubt in herself had too.

Ghost does not desert him and the red woman lowers herself into the seat left by the others, her sleeves dripping crimson silk onto the floor. The firelight catches in her ruby and it flashes like a mirror on a string, distorting the glare, each flicker riotous and short, like the parry of tiring swords. She spares neither he nor the direwolf a look and watches the flames without expression. The silence is steady, augmented by the snap and crumble of kindling burning.

"What is it that you have decided, Jon Snow?" she murmurs, "can you be kept?"

He watches her flames, they have deceived her before - the room is warm and though his skin tingles from a heat that would have otherwise left another man sweating, even in this winter, he feels none of it touch his bones.

"I am not your Azor Ahai, I am not your dead king, nor another one of your false prophets."

If the mention of Stannis wounds her, she does not show it. The red woman's watch of the flames is remote, as if none of them are in the room. Yet, she speaks to him. "Then who are you?"

It is not a sarcastic, bitter query - it does not challenge. It asks for the truth he wants to give her.

"Nothing you've claim to."

"Of course," the red woman nods, her voice near musical. it is a sad music. "Then Not-Jon Snow, cursing imagined gods, do you know why you were brought back?"

It is anger, it is feeling that he feels then. The red woman asks him to declare a power and in doing so, enslave him to it. It is true, something did bring him into living - it did not ask permission, it only gave and took as it pleased. Old gods, gods of fire, seven gods, all of them false and meddling, if it were they - and they made him angry, he closed his eyes and ground the back of his jaw, tightening against speaking. Words held their own violence, and if he held nothing in him, that nothingness was displaced best by breathtaking violence. As befitting a monster.

The red woman, still wise and sure - who _pretended_ - 

"For what purpose?"

"For what need?" the anger in him had only been pretending to sleep, his fingers close down, biting into wood. They belay the calm, hardness of his tone. "Does anyone ask to be born?"

"The gods - "

"There are no gods."

"What is it you desire?"

He has with ease held fast against the others, they were no one to him. He had known she would come, that she would perhaps pile her skirts above her knee and draw herself over him and thought he'd kill her if she tried. She does not touch him, she sits where she sits and asks the hollow centre of him much he does not care to answer. He felt nothing when Dolorous Ed reminisced the mutiny in nostalgic tones, wry and dreadful - felt nothing when an old man came to sit by him, tears in his eyes - but the red woman angers him in a way that in entirely unwelcome.

Desire? There was nothing in him that wanted, never mind wanting want itself. South - it was a place, South is a place. But he did not move and he hated her, he who swore never to be moved in such a way ever again, yet now to bear their meddling still.

What is it you desire? Long for? Hate?

"I am your servant," her silk sleeves whisper, pushed by some breath in this room. "your tool, your slave - I can offer you nothing but my service."

"Your service did not save your King."

"But I do not serve a King. I do not even serve a man, do I?"

Impatience blackens his tone, his knuckles in their nakedness, straining, white. "I will not be ruled by you or your god, leave me be."

"I have tired of directing men, too much have I been certain, vain and arrogance even in faith? I only tell you what I know, Jon Snow and what the gods decree you will do. I cannot keep you."

"Is that what your fires have told you?"

"The Long Night is night," the red woman murmurs to her flames, ignoring his disgust, "it is your destiny to fight the darkness."

The fire is weak, it has no hold in the North and no rule on him.

"You’ll never see Samwell Tarly again, will you? You sit here like a dog mourning, awaiting its master’s return, but you have no masters, you say. Go. You think yourself finished with life and this world, but you will find that it is not finished with you."

He rises, "You asked me once, what I saw?" she looks up at him with the regal lift of her chin but his words have struck her here, there is a brightness in her eyes she cannot hide quickly enough, it sickens like hope and fear - it tells him she wants to know still. Her words have angered him, this change in tune, that she tells him go - he who would love only to leave - as if he can do still what she wants. Go, she says. As if it will change nothing, as if there is still a destiny for him nothing he can do will dare disrupt. Her daring and her audacity move him to come close to her chair, close to where she is nothing but a body, like any other body, not fast enough for the blade he might draw from his boot and slide blindingly quick over her throat. He'd be quick, she wouldn't even be able to mouth the dead boy's name, pray, breathe a spell.

He does not reach for the blade, he kneels by her chair and looks into her strange, bright eyes. He lowers his voice and makes it no longer secret. "There was nothing. That is what awaits. Nothing - the long night comes and it is no different."

"The darkness was the Great Other, the afterlife does not exist because he is winning the war."

"I will not fight your war, I will not be voted Lord Commander. I will not die for it, I will not die for anything - I will fight and I will survive and when I am taken I will go, but I will answer you no more. I have given my life, leave me this shadow - it is mine, it's mine."

His breath shakes, his chest burns. Ghost growls, a body of whirling shadows.

She lowers her eyes, and she sounds like a young child. "I am yours still."

"If you do not leave me now, I will kill every man in this holdfast - all who dare to want me be their fool again, to vote for me and rule me. I will slaughter all of them, I will break this wall and do all the death that has been denied me. Do you hear me?"

"And I am yours still."

Laughter bursts out of him, blistering and awful. "I do not _want_ you."

She rises and looks down upon him, meeting his eye boldly, like a wild grey-eyed girl brave beneath her mother's glare. She is not invincible then or regal, but known. It uproots him. "I am yours still," she speaks again in a woman's voice, not like a little girl who loves him - it was not hers to borrow, it was not hers. Rage tears through him, robbing him of speech. He is still on his knees when she curtsies, sweeping away from him, does as asked and leaves.

Samwell Tarly's books are wet on the shelf, groaning in the cold. Ghost, a runt in a litter, surviving the dead. A poor throne in a broken crypt. _Go._

He is on his knees, his lungs burn.

_Go._

He can bear the room no longer.

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 Once a man had said the words his blood was black. Black as a bastard's heart. His shadow falls heavy over the hay and waxy faces turn away from the fire, one by one turning to him. Tormund is crouched next to the simmering pot, ladle stirring. "Is Jon Snow finally hungry for stone soup?" 

He stands beneath the doors, shoulders heaving.

"If a man can have soup, he's sure to shit. Eating, shitting, fucking - that's what makes a man." Tormund goes on, not even looking up. "Dying too. Gods don't do that - or they do, some of the wilder ones. They eat and fuck and die, but you never hear of them shitting. Can you shit, Jon Snow?" Silence answers him, but he doesn't mind. "We wildlings still die, so would his grace kindly shut the fucking doors instead of posturing about letting the chill in?"

His heart is beating so fast he's sure he might expire, he steps in and Ghost shadows. He heaves the stable closed.

"You didn't come."

Tormund titters as he ladles soup into a chipped bowl and whispers something as he helps the child situate his meal against his elbow, his hands both end in badly bandaged stubs. Then the pale waxy faces move away from the fire, from Tormund, so a dead man might come in.

"Did they not ask you?"

Tormund snorts, finally granting him his attention. He watches Jon Snow stand over him and then sit. "Aye, they did."

"You refused."

"I'm no kneeler, listening to kneelers, coming to court a kneeler who doesn't want to kneel, telling him to kneel. See lad, you were never my Lord Commander, never my son, never my King or prophet, or god - What do I fucking care about what you decide to do?" He speaks with no true heat, shrugging. "If Jon Snow says he's not Jon Snow? Stubborn, thick-skulled mule Jon Snow is, there's no convincing him, not even if I'd had a kissed-by-fire cunt - there's simply no luck to be had turning him. No, I'm needed elsewhere, I can be useful where I've better uses."

 _Kissed by fire,_ the heat in his chest surprises him. The nonchalance of these words.

"I'm not afraid of you either, they all think you're a god or an Other."

He wet his lips. "And you?"

"I've never seen an Other eat, or take a shit." and - to his surprise, the bowl hangs in the space between them. The wildling offers him poor, cloudy stew. "so, are you a god now?"

He watches the steaming lip of the bowl for a moment, long, before he takes it.

And he takes it only to set it aside, down on the icy, muddied hay. He takes it to reject it.

“Oh? Are you a god now, is that it?" Tormund sucks his teeth at this, his face grim. “Maybe the red one like your witch woman says, making meat of Mance.”

 _Mance._ He swallows against the tightness in his throat, against the knowing. “I'm not. There are no gods.”

“Maybe so,” he agrees, “but there’s warmth and drink and children, and things that put the fire in yer heart all the same. Jon Snow had it, beneath his sulking – you have it too.”

He is an empty hearth, swept out, barren.

“There’s blood in you, Jon Snow.” he says softly, his gaze fiercely steady. “Enough to want blood for shedding,” and he grips the shape of the blade beneath his jerkin, that rust red weapon unclean with death, sharp from vengeance. “Enough to answer, same as a man, or a wolf’s – a beast maybe but even then still, still a thing alive. I’ve seen the dead and you aren’t no dead man. You’re too angry. But you say yer no god – when I call you Jon Snow you look at me and hate the name. There’s blood in you, Jon Snow – enough to want to avenge a wrong you say done to a dead boy. Will you look aside and let my people starve?”

 

And though he is not Jon Snow, he finds he cannot meet this man's eyes.

Cannot meet his eyes and say, _yes._

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

__I saw him in the flames_ , _fighting at Winterfell__

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Cecilia Woloch's “Greed.”


	3. it was blood, it was what you shed, lord. it gleamed.

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

_She says that she is a Stark. Your sister._

* * *

 

 

 -

 

 

* * *

 

There is a woman come to see him, Edd Tollet says.

He appears after dawn to tell him what he already knows, bringing with him a small pouch of weevil ridden grains, fennel and rock-hard potato. The grain rattles with the small, black bodies but in the coming moons such will be more precious than saphires, rubies, any number of gems.

He wipes his knife on the buck’s flanks and rises, Ghost guards the kill as it sways on its rope, draining to turn the snow beneath the tree into slurry. Edd shadows him into the small hut, nervously mincing over withered root and debris and ducking beneath the skinny northern hares strung across the low ceiling. “…She says she is your half-sister.”

Jon Snow’s sister would have come, clinging to the coarse mane of Edd’s starving horse, she would not have waited in a keep.

“Jon?”

The buck is in the snow still, blood steaming. He must have gone in to look for a whet stone for his knife has been losing sharpness and the skin cannot be damaged if he is to pry it away.  He crouches and attends to the blade, sharpening its edge with steady swipes of his whetstone. Edd’s shadow is still on the floor, so he looks up. “I don’t have any sisters.”  

“She wants to see you.”

He does not slow, a man Jon Snow knew would take hours attending to legendary steel beneath a tree with bleeding eyes. It had been metal pure enough to seem above sullying, taking off the heads of deserters and now suitable enough to immobilize the wights. What had been the blade's name?

The straw that pads the floor is damp, it is a hovel only a little better than Craster's Keep which even now is vile enough to keep him away. It is one of the Free Folk's shacks and made more amenable by materials he has salvaged from the village of White Tree and warm enough to suit him. He has no bastard blade from a man who had thought to think him his son, he has dragon glass and good enough iron.

The fire pit smokes pitifully, Ed Tollet steps around it, shrugging his shoulders as he might be able to ward off his shivers. "She looks to be in a bad way." he says carefully between the scrape and scream of the sharpening stone, determined to ignore the dismissal. He decides to crouch before him. "She's running from something, only she won't say what and she's got a knight with her too who trusts us just as little. When was the last time you heard news from South, Jon, do you remember?"

The whetstone swipes, the edge is thinning into cruel, new steel.

When Ed claps down on his wrist he jerks so badly he nearly cuts himself on his own knife - he forces himself not to react further, he does not suffer touch, he will not suffer the pity in this man's eyes for thinking that he startles an injured thing when in truth it had taken all he had in him to step down on his instinct to curve the blade upwards and slit his throat.

_He pities when he should fear._

"She's scared and she's hurt, and she's got reason for her mistrust...may be that she thinks we'll give her up to whoever wants her. She won't let me write to the Northern houses, she won't write to anyone herself until she sees you." 

 

The tough, broken leather of this man's glove feels like it is marbled in glass over the little skin not covered by the drab sleeves. His mouth is tucked in, his cheekbones gaunt, his skull is the long and strange structure drawn over by grey tarp of his skin, so thin it's near comical, in a way. _I can see your bones coming through, you wasting thing._

_Oh, you are growing old, Ed Tollet._

 

He should not be outside in such sparse furs but Ed has always been able to bear suffering with a sort of bored tolerance, grim and witty Dolorous Ed watches him rise, watches him put away his sharpening things and take down the winter hare.

Ghost still sits there, watching the dead buck and watches too, the open door.

"Go," he says after he has filled this man's arms with game. “and show her the pyres.” 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

  

 

 

 

Four times they vote him Lord Commander, thrice he refuses before he relents in scorn. His orders are few but they are binding, in the wings of his decrees is the promise of unspeakable punishment should they be disobeyed. They will give him, a dead man the title, but it is Ed Tollet's burden to carry these duties. All the men of the Night's Watch have done now is to throw themselves under the threat of his displeasure, what he will give them should he be denied is no less than they deserve, and their future is what they have been fools enough to choose themselves.

The Deeplake is to be garrisoned, there are black brothers keeping it but they are undermanned. There are more wildlings to come who will supplement these numbers, for there may be some still who have survived and the men of the Nights Watch are few. Jon Snow would have tried to reason with everyone in the hall, to explain himself but he cares little for the sentiments of traitors and liars, it is a matter of necessity and survival, if they want it. Mole town, ruins it may be, he gifts to the wildlings to take refuge.

He leaves Ed Tollet in charge of all affairs regarding the Black brothers and to perform all the duties without the title they would so eagerly waste on a dead boy. Tormund speaks for the wildlings and looks to the care of his own people, so a dead man must make a dead man's oath - if any harm befalls either two of these men, he promises that he will burn the Wall down.

It is finished within moments, he leaves the hall as quietly as he'd entered it, they are barely back in their seats. Oh, had they thought to settle? He had come among them in the midst of loud argument, debating on how to keep him and what to do. He had watched them take the vote. _I will slit the throat of any man who puts his lot forward with Jon Snow_. Again he warned them, again they all cast their vote for Jon Snow and looked to him with defiance, as though with the clear eyes of faith.

_They will make me a false god, they will not give up Jon Snow._

Oh, they were terrified but they stood before the living dead and felt themselves in a new age, and new men, ready to undo their betrayals as Jon Snow had undone death.

But death had undone Jon Snow, and what remained was cold and cruel to the wants of such men. He will take the office and give their man the duties, he will not give them his body to rent down with their knives, to feed their fires and to legitimise their gods. No more.

Ghost pads ahead of him. The footfalls following down the steps can only belong to Ser Davos who shuffles after him quickly, dislodging soft peaks of snow from the rails. "Where do you go?"

"Go home, Ser Davos." It is a curt dismissal but a readier answer than they have been used to from him since he woke. He has been slow with speaking, weary of language and the petty demands of the living. The Onion Knight pauses, his few fingers springing and unspringing from the pommel of his sword, his brow writ with aches for his own wife, his children, if any do remain to him. But it is a momentary lapse for he will not leave Jon Snow's side. He shakes his head instead, a grizzled bird shrugging off a cheap sleight and hardens his mouth to press his suite again. An old fool.

"There is no need, Ser Davos." It is Melisendre who speaks for him, waiting for him to cross the courtyard to where he has kept his things, stealthy as a shadow and missed just as nearly. Some men have bled out of the hall but are wise enough to think twice of coming down, watching curiously from above. Her voice is smooth and deep as mulled wine, her mouth does not smile but the words she speaks come too much with a sort of knowing that verges on pleasure. "The dead cannot pass the Wall."

A scowl marrs the Onion Knight's face, the red priestess is composed, paying the pacing Ghost no mind, and far less concerned with the sight of the Lord Commander shrugging on his pack. Whatever had so unnerved her has been come to terms with. _How quick a creature to find her footing in the wake of all things,_ but he will pay her no more mind and play no more of their games.

She was a witch still clinging to trickery, not all trickery need involve magic or gods. _Words are wind,_ a man had said once. A fool.

He is no fool, he will go whether she wills him to or not. The days are short, the cold sun licking down the horizon, the night deepening before it relinquishes itself to the pale day. Jon Snow would have wondered what she wanted, and wondered what she was trying to make him do. 'The dead cannot pass the Wall' could mean,  _do not go_  - or  _I dare you not to, therefore you will_  - warning, goading...as though even now he would still do what others pleased, awake or not.

They are raising the gate, she falls into step with him but Ghost is between them, to spare her own little dignity she does not try to sidle closer. The Onion Knight follows, his head low and speaking severely. "The Others are coming, you've no hope of surviving beyond the Wall!" 

He stalks forward, shadowed along either shoulder as the snowy plains reveal themselves, the gates whine in protest heaving up with all the ease of a rusted dagger being forced out of its twisted sheath, the metal bristles down flakes of ice as it jerks and shudders, rising

"Jon Snow will not die," Melisendre soothes, sounding nearly kind. "even if he goes looking for death."

Ser Davos inhales sharply as though to ready to say something cutting but the gates were already overhead, the frost raining down upon their shoulders, his beloved Jon Snow's steps will not slow and so he despairs, his arm shooting out, taking whatever he can hold of the Lord Commander's cloak in his few fingers, forcing him to face him. "Your visions have failed you, time and time again. Jon, you will die beyond there and what use will it all have been? Why accept the office of Lord Commander if you are to give all your duties to Ed Tollet? Did you not mean to run South? Why North, Jon? If you will not save yourself like a coward, you have to stay here and look after your people!"

He had no people, he might say but he need not speak it for the man to hear it. Dispassionately he looked into these oft careful eyes as they flashed for the first time with sudden fire. "You must look to the living, Jon, else all is lost!"

"You need not exert yourself reminding him now," the red woman's voice is soft but dismissing and the old man has a look in his eye, mad as though he might strike her if he had it in him to be cruel. The men minding the gate and the courtyard will become uneasy with leaving the gate open for so long, pending the grievances of a priestess and an onion knight, fighting over what is no longer there. "He will know what he will know, when he knows it."

The old man wants to argue, wants to fight, but he is tired too - and wary of the gate, wary of the red woman - his eyes shine with knowing and betrayal.

"Perhaps you are right," He relinquishes his poor hold and shoves, anger reminding him of his strength. It surprises even a dead man, for he staggers. "May be as you say, may be that you are not Jon Snow," he says, "for Jon Snow would not have been such a _coward_."

The red woman watches him stalk away, only now there is a softness, an uneasily found peace in her glance. The old triumph had always been hers before but Winter has come and the dead have eaten of her and she looks to him again, meets his own cool, empty glare. Her feet have made prints on the snow, there is frost glittering in her hair and she is not so warm as she once was, she is a living thing that can die. She searches him, sure of what she does not see, and without the mystifying arrogance reminds him again. "I am your servant still. Does it no longer make you angry?"

Ghost sprints, leaving him for the first time since he woke to his heart beating, for a moment there is fear to make him empty, striking at him and making him naked under the woman's eye. Then he steadies, the wolf heart beats beneath the seam and twist of his own, there can be no separation, not one either of them can survive anyway. It is nearly a comfort then. He who has put his head against the dark and endless space of death, who woke with blackened ice in his ruptured chest.

Draining away from his temples, blinding his eyes had been the water from his wet, shorn hair. To be tied to something that asks as little from him as that same dark. Ghost is mute and cannot call him the wrong name, cannot demand of him things he can no longer give. They are no longer truly direwolf and master, if ever they were. They are joined, nearly as deeply as he'd been joined to that dark. Ghost has run forward, called by the white plains, the woods, the wilderness. These were the only honest things.

He wants to go too, only he will not let her mysticism be what forces him to flee all that much faster. He did not accept to be made Lord Commander for her devotion or out of love of _her_.

He did not live to please anyone. Only again perhaps, trying to settle his sums with a dead boy named Jon Snow who could not bear the suffering of the Free Folk and live. The deaths of traitors he has given to Jon Snow, the safety of his beloved wildlings he will give to Jon Snow, _he will not give more than that._

He will not stay and live among the needy, ugly demands of these others who would demand more from him. Jon Snow had been married to his duty where he could not be born in honour as his true-born siblings had been born, he tried to borrow Stark honour as a bastard might die doing and tried to make it his own.

But he owned nothing, he belonged to nothing.

Duty could not pull him, for duty had been the death of Jon Snow. To stay here is to enslave himself to the living as Jon Snow had, is to be reminded more and more of the poor dead-bastard and to be broken down, eroded, steeped in it all until he was unable to deny him, and being unable to deny Jon Snow meant being unable to deny much of the living.

And so he would not stay.

The army of the dead were coming, he did not know whether or not he would fight them. He did not know the word 'want' beyond being certain that he wanted to be away from these other things that would keep him who were just as much a danger to him as any wight. He did not have their blue eyes but he was nearly as hollow, he would see what he would see, and know what he would know but he would never be the living's to own, never again.

He went into seclusion further North, to let the old life decay - would he were to wipe that name the world like a child's scrawl in the frost.

But the red woman will have her say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 –

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

He may have lived beyond the Wall like a simple grounds-keeper catching poor, dwindling game which he would give over to those who dared darken his door, but he still prowled like a wolf, like a man of the Night's Watch, and saw what he saw, to know what he would know. He came across stray wildlings and led them quietly back to the Wall knowing half of them would die before they would reach, it was what the dead boy would have wanted.

He came across small bands of the dead but never the promised host. The dead had gone quiet, perhaps it was his own eerieness that displaced them. Or, he knew, there was some greater ugliness that lay in wait, dark preparations beyond his comprehension but soon, inevitably, to come to a head. The Wall remained, a final barrier to be contended with. He wasted no time wondering what would come and in what manner, he would be hunting to keep the living fed as best as he was able, he would receive reports from small bands of rangers of the Night's Watch who were terrified of their duty and terrified of him, but he suffered none of them to spend a night's rest under the dipilated roof of his own hut.

One night he hid himself against a rotten trunk, crystal frozen down the line of his bow string like water clinging to spider-web, there had been frost in his beard, making jagged his inhalations. The wind was full of shredded ice, blearing some of his sight but there was no fog. Ghost had kept far enough behind where the wood had begun, knowing to lie downwind so as not to alert the game with his scent. They had followed the faint imprint of deer tracks for days and there they were, a herd stood like white shadows in the glow of the moon.

He counted ten of them. They were large, their antlers coated in ice, lacquered in the moonlight of the small clearing. What had brought them there he did not know, for there was no green to forage, nor shelter to keep them warm.

He drew his arrow long and nearly without a sound.

The largest turned its neck, the bowstring gave out. Vicious fire struck along his cheek where the wire had snapped forward, lashing him but the cold was so hard it stoppered the wound. The air broke clean inside of his lungs as each of the herd turned their heads toward him. In the sockets of their eyes were dead, bled-out sapphires and their antlers shone with gore.

He moved to draw his sword but they were gone.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

-

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

_She says she is a Stark. Your sister._

Jon Snow was no Stark, he'd had half-brothers and two half-sisters and of those two only one of them had felt the word. The other had been some sort of bird, pretty and flying away from him. Not a flesh and blood thing, hardly real in his heart.

The red woman had watched him go North, and even as the Wall grew further away he could still see her in his mind’s eye, stood beneath the gate with her palms hidden in her sleeves. She had caught him by the arm and he could not stop the hiss of her prophecies scraping against the meet of jaw and neck like a blade.  _I dreamed a girl in grey._

_You will return here, Jon Snow._

He hides away like a shadow on the Wall, a crow on a tree. He sees the falling feathery ice melt into her hair.

She wears a face perhaps familiar to him but her lips are blue and she is sleight and sharp like a frozen branch, like one of the beaten children from Flea Bottom unfortunate enough to be sorted into their ranks, damned to the Wall because they were caught stealing an orange.

Her face is white from terrors survived. She stands in the courtyard, turns and turns and turns, searching with the disquiet of an animal not sure what to do away from a hidden corner, too exposed in the courtyard as though it were a clearing in the wood. She is a girl like worn floatsam and not at all like a wolf, and it is Dolorous Edd who goes down to meet  her and when he speaks to her she becomes very still.

Eddard Stark’s wife must have become as still when she’d known her lord-husband would bring to her his bastard, something in her must have frozen over forever. It was not birth now that made the tremor run through her, that made her chest shake so badly that her great armoured sword came forward and between them to cut Dolorous Edd with curtness and shield her lady's weakness from his eyes.

Her giant leads her into the keep. He leaves his perch, stealthy as a crow.

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

He thinks that they will feed her and clothe her and then she will go, fly away somewhere else. They have already told her that he is dead but still she does not go. Ed Tollet was once a better liar when he'd had cause to lie.

Five days after and she still does not leave. Winter is deepening, the White Knife frozen hard, the firth a brittle field of white glass. The wildlings have stopped coming to seek refuge at the wall because whoever is not already sheltered behind the wall has not survived their torched camps, have succumbed elsewhere. They man the towers and he knows his orders have been heeded.

Ed Tollet has already come to disrupt his peace, other prophets will come, he will not suffer further visitors and the men of the Night's Watch are a fickle, traitorous lot who need reminders that he still exists to be their reckoning should he be disobeyed.

So he brings game himself and goes to see Jon Snow's half-sister.

He has seen her through the eyes of mice and spiders, Sansa Stark who stares at the hearth in the Lord Commander's rooms, the fire passing over her like ripples of surface water - a heart long drowned. He has seen her in dreams. He has seen her when Jon Snow perished, weaving her fingers through the gleaming pelt of a direwolf, singing as the snow melted underneath the flood of a bastard's black blood. He never dreams, but he has dreamed of her.

Ghost who had never once left his side until she brought herself to the Wall, Ghost moving along the wall, through thick snow to scent at the ice.

He cannot abide it.

She is a dead girl, she means next to nothing to him in the old life. A snatch of silly song, a vapour, a ghost. She will be dead once more, exorcised and dismissed. Fly away, like summer, like a bird, like honour.

He was not a man, he was but the shape of one.

She was not his sister, she was not real, she was just a name - she was a winged wolf flying out of a tower, a lie that didn't matter. Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa, and the Baratheon king had ground his jaw, his eyes two black fires. Oh, to be denied. to be denied. Winterfell is sacked, the Boltons dance in the skins of false kings, kraken, direwolf, stags - there is nothing for you here, Sansa Stark.

I am like a Bolton, wearing your dead bastard-brother's skins, I have the shape of him, but I am not a man.

A name like snow can be cast off, soft, white, melting like snow flakes, like a bastard's borrowed honour, hardly real.

A blizzard comes with him, they drop the gates behind him quickly, the gears rattling in protest - the sound swallowed by snow, the howl of ice.

Sansa Stark, the child, had belonged to beauty, soft, bourne with the river's gentle gesture. A perfect reflection of her mother's Tully grace and the courtly charm of only the most noble lord's most accomplished daughter, lovely and proper and haughty. In the fluff and sweet cotton off her head there were closed coral pink lady's rooms and mute servants in a golden castle, her voice was all the sweeter for the foolishness of her songs and the fullness of her silly heart somehow making the songs true. She was beautiful, made for beautiful things, for a beautiful Southron lord in a beatiful Southron keep, made for the high harp and to live in lushly blooming gardens where people would stoop their heads and keen their ears and love her at once without asking themselves why.

She was still beautiful and beauty soiled her so that she could never again escape it. Years ago she had been radiant as the sun but that sun had set and she had in her the forbidding, haunted beauty of a moon.

A sun may be looked away from, may destroy the eyes, but no one can help but be struck by a moon. The sight of her struck as a moon does.

There was firelight trapped in her hair, shadow grazed along the marble of her skin, she was leaner and older, she was not a branch but a fine rode of glass. To lay hands upon her was to break her, but it was also to bleed.

She was guarded, even when she thought herself alone wrapped in grey wool, staring at nothing, as awful as the statues in the crypts, it was the same as those old dreams, remembering them now, Jon Snow would still delve deeper into the earth, drawn into the cradle of wet dirt and forbidding stone like a man between the slim, shining thighs.

She was a stone, had always been aloof as became the daughter of a great lord but  - it swooped and pitched down low in his gut - that her feet were bare, tucked up, still pink from the bath.

Her eyes fluttered open, her face did not change but that her lips went white.

He does not move from the swarthe of dark by the door. He wants her to go back to sleep, he wants to melt away into the shadows and vanish again. He says nothing, as though he will not be seen.

But she does not leap from her seat, to hide from him as she would one of the black brothers who might wish too dishonour her with their wants - no, he thinks, there is no room for honour this far North, only death, only wolves. She peers at him. She had been snow-lashed, hungry, pale as defeat...weak, he'd thought. She'd shaken so badly.

She doesn't move now, looking at him with the staggered stillness of a man who has had all his wounds torn open. She is a ghost of a girl from a ghost of a place and her eyes are like the back of a river, shining in the dark, knowing him. "Jon."

It might be a question, so soft, she doesn't dare.

He lowers himself to his haunches, sleekly, moves a shade too fast for a man.

She swallows, straightening higher to look at him, her nails pearly on the arms of her seat. Her soft soles hide from him when she lowers her feet from the floor, her ankles are torn up, scarred, still healing. She must have made some of the journey on foot, he surmises and blinks up to see her adjusting her shawl around herself, damp from her wet hair.  Unnerved by his scrutiny.

As she should be.

"Where is your pup?"

His voice is rough from disuse and her eyes suddenly glaze with tears. "Lady?" she speaks gently, without a tremble. Her mother's eyes are different from hers, they would never have shone so. "She's...She's dead."

He nods, it is to be as expected. "What do you want?"

She raises herself to her feet, looking down at him, careful. "Jon..."

"They told you. I am not your brother."

The spill of her night trail drags across the stone like a wing.

Stay away, he should have told her, but he stayed where he was, crouched like a thing forever between sleep and lunge. Drowsy and dangerous. It was he who had climbed through her window, who had not announced himself, who waited in shadow like the a gullet, to swallow at nothing but the sight of dead sisters, to loom over unseen, he had wanted something. Want was folly, was somehow new again to this body, wants as nameless as he - and yet, settled into him like blood in the vein, old as the bones he'd stolen from his whore-mother in the womb, before him and beyond him, began him. Want, without a name, without.

He would have been afraid, if he'd known how to be afraid anymore. Here was the demon, one of them, both of them, called out to be cast out, face to ghostly face. She said a name. Only a name. It raised the gooseflesh along his arms and made his throat ache a little.

The current of his soul had gone still, dead as the petrified trees, still as the broken columns of Winterfell. His wrists twist on his knees, she stops close enough for him to take the pale, moon mouth of her ankle in hand. If he should want such a thing.

The rough grey cotton of the dress and the soft shadow passing between the gap of her knees, flickeringly modest.

He will deny her. " _Jon_ ," she whispers.

A prayer to the wrong god.

He stares up at her then, bold as a hunting dog, watchful and waiting.

His  knuckles close instead around her hem, thumb rubbing along the thread. She lets out a choked sob, half hope, half agony and then gripping him with surprising strength, she is taking him to her even as she falls to him. The breath knocked out of his chest as though by a sweeping hammer, hands like claws coming around her waist to support her, his breath, level and even, caught and broke wildly.

He was lunged, hurtled against her, his knees knocked down into the floor forced to catch her, the blow breaking through his marrow.

And like Winter, like her father's sword, did Sansa Stark fall weeping upon him.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

-

 

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Paul Celan's “Tenebrae."


	4. to come to you willingly - even now i ask for this ache

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

The floor flips and he comes up with the rafters, a snarl of shadows hangs over her, and _Jon_ -

Ice pierces through her shift and slams the air from her lungs, for a moment there is dizziness sloshing over her skull with its wine

Then there is Jon, crowding her sight like the dark of night.

His eyes are _wild._

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jon has gone beyond the Wall, his man blurts to her once they are safely out of the wind and away from onlookers, the mess hall empty.

Her bastard half-brother could not be called back, and he confessed meekly that he would not let her go to him, if she were even to suggest such a thing.

Sansa insides seem to crumple in on themselves with relief, but Brienne is full of only harsh rebukes for frightening them so. The way her brother’s steward had looked in the courtyard, the hushed carefulness of his words...it had made her fear the worst.

“Lady Sansa did not travel this far to - “

Managing her dizziness, Sansa lifts her hand and the lady-knight of Tarth falls silent. “Thank you,” she says as kindly as she can manage. The ice is thawing painfully in her fingers, her blood feels like shards in the vein. “When will my brother’s mission beyond the Wall end?”

“My lady,” Ed Tollet began mincingly, with that same infuriating carefulness of tone. “It won’t….there is no mission, Jon - he is...not himself.”

 _Tell him that it is Arya who has come to see him_ , a voice croons in her ear, mint sharp against her neck. _He will come running and honour will keep him here._

Sansa closes her eyes against it, she would call it Petyr’s slynes except after all this time that she knows it now  as her own. The wisest thing to do would be to send this man to bring Jon back here with a lie, but she won’t. Brienne would think it dishonourable and his loyal man already knew her name.

It is then that a woman rises, seemingly out of nowhere. Her hair and her gown as deep and red as blood rolling down the steps of the Great sept.

But Sansa is no more a child and knows that she is no spectre curling out of smoke, there is a stool in the corner the woman has vacated. She is only a sly thing sat in the shadows, waiting to be seen.

Frozen half to death, Sansa can only look up at her with wary mistrust. Brienne’s hand tightens sternly around the hilt of her sword and Podrick sets his jaw determinedly.

The woman has the gall to smile down at her. “Sansa Stark.”

“I did not see you,” Sansa murmurs, trying not to grit her teeth. That this woman knows her name makes dread draw its claws down her spine. To hear it these days sounds as fine as a declaration of malice.

“Perhaps you did not. I am Melisendre of Assai."

“We should wait for Ser Davos,“ the steward mutters quickly, staring guardedly away from this woman.

But Sansa speaks a little sharply then. “No," she finds her voice. "let her speak.”

The woman’s smile only deepens, genuine and warm, and so calm it is alarming. She looks upon Sansa as a friend and speaks the ugly words as though what she says could only ever bring Sansa comfort and ease. “Jon Snow is no longer as you knew him.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

He pins her to the rushes by her shoulders.

He has the frantic strength of a man who might startle into slitting her throat.

A moment ago she had had him in her arms, desperate to capture this ghost, give him form. A moment before that he had slunk in like a cat, a foul omen, looking upon her with cold silence - speaking with the slow, odd tongue of a stranger.

And were they not strangers? He looks hardly like a man but the weight of him is like a man’s, crushing her collar-bones, the smell of him unwashed and headily like the inside of a curing house. A beard as untamed as a wildling's, but Northern - her throat itches, wet. _Northern_.

 _You came to frighten me,_ she swallows, anger momentarily sparking in the back of her thoughts. He has not come as her brother, she had been warned not to expect to pull him with the ties of blood.

And yet a moment ago he had the touched the hem of her night-trail, his eyes full of - she didn’t have a name for what had been in Jon’s eyes then.

Had he been giving her form too then? Or had he been proving his resentment, to show her that he could touch her and feel nothing? The way a man does, to prove his power. Whatever his intention...it felt all too suddenly that he had made her realer than she’d ever been since they took father’s head, with nothing but the mere trace of his hand over thread.

Sansa was _real._

She had run through the cold, been numbed through and heard the crack of her bones like the insides of trees breaking as the bark hardened into frost. A blizzard had razed her blue, Theon’s hand in hers like a stubbed stone paw, making her into stone - running, hurting everywhere, no longer a girl but a ghost in a void, trying to outrun death, to outrun Winter.

A moment ago she had been a teary girl, too filled on desperate hope to know what to do.

Now she is alive, her back growing cold, the firelight dragging over him in tongues, menacing. There is breath in her, there is light around her with which she can see. There is the scar around his eye, hooking at her.

His beard has come in thick, he is stained in smoke and the stink of iron. His unwashed body and his shadowed face…he looks like a wildling.

 _He looks like father_ , some distortion warped back wild as a sorcerer’s mirror.

Sansa is alive. Still afraid of the usual things, the terrible things that are coming for her - but Jon is above her and breathing too, real enough to hold in both her hands, if he’d let her.

Her blood pulses wildly but her heart itself is steadying, there is no terror. The ice on his sleeve has splattered over her bared throat, the heat of the room is making it melt. The blizzard is a hunting dog’s howl outside of the Lord Commander’s quarters, sealing them in. Her hair sticks to her face, to her neck, to her cheeks and her eyes dry, the salt of her own tears shimmer on her lashes but she only looks up at Jon, absorbing the sight of him as he is.

Menacing, yes. Yet she is calmer than she should be. His hands had been ice around her waist, hard as claws. Now he holds her down to the floor, his face as close as the Hounds had been when he had spat his truths. Her chest rises and falls, her ribs still bruised, complaining of the abuse as she feels his body hard and strong through the gown.

She should have recoiled from the stench of him. After Ramsay, even the thought of a man’s  touch should have her thrashing.

Only this is Jon, smelling to her of wet pelts and doused firepits…

And a little, she thinks, like Lady.

He is breathing hard, like a man running for his life. His mind races behind his eyes, spinning like ice in the river, breaking itself into pieces, and Sansa speaks nothing, whatever tears she has shed have run themselves dry, turned to ice when she fled.

Beneath Jon, her eyes are clear and still.

_He could slit your throat._

His eyes had been silty, like the lazy curls of smoke, a moment ago.

But not anymore.

And she wonders faintly,  _I should be afraid._

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

He was not Jon anymore, they said. He kept his lands as jealously as the statues had guarded the crypts of Winterfell.

What did that mean? Was he a beast now? A spirit?

A man who does not want his name, perhaps.

She takes his rooms, threadbare and sparse they have an unlived air to them, an emptied tomb. Podrick sees about procuring some fare to eat and in his absence a boy comes in to sweep out the old rushes. He wears the same black cloaks she finds in the trunk at the foot of the Lord Commander’s beds but his boots are the tied together hides of mountain goat.

Lady Brienne watches him closely as Sansa drops heavily into the chair before the hearth, too weary to fear even a wildling child’s rumoured savageness.

He could scarce be older than Rickon was when they left for King’s Landing with father, she raises her head after he comes away from the fire he has tended new for her. He chances a look at her once before thinking better of it, and scurries away without waiting for dismissal.

Sansa sends the lady-knight away to rest, Brienne is stubborn but accepts without much argument for she is tired too and badly in need of sleep. It has been a terrible journey here and all the steel in the world is useless if the bearer is too exhausted to fight properly.

Sansa is in silence quickly enough, stew steaming on a table,  turning cold. She rubs at her temples, her shoulders weighed down by further complications. The worst thing she'd feared from Jon was his hatred for how distant she'd been in their childhood, she'd thought though that she could rely on his sense of honour, on his love of their family. She'd been sure of his forgiveness eventually, of him doing his duty, to give her his protection if not his sword.

Now they told her she'd have only his indifference. That he _refused_ his name.

Sansa bows her head into her hands, small and shivering, sodden and tired - she is _tired._ Proper posture breaking, crumpling up like wet parchment. She is tired and afraid, and tired of being both.

Jon has brought _wildlings_ from beyond the Wall - in all the years the North had stood…her father would not have allowed for such a thing, none of the Northern lords would.

Starved, broken things like her. They could not hide what they were and when she set eyes on them, she didn’t know how to feel.

Every day spent waiting for Jon is another day that brings her beastly husband closer to the Wall, for he must have realized where she has run to by now.

Ramsay is coming.

She closes her eyes. White haired and shivering, sprinting through the trees, she sees him running. Her heart climbs into her throat, banging just to think of it. She slides to her knees and brings her hands to the fire, so close there is a burn along her fingertips, the red scorch, lashing at them. Her eyes are shut, it is near prayer. _Let him reach the sea_ , she nearly asks - though her lips will not move, knowing what whispered wishes the gods have bent back out of shape before they gave them back to her in the flesh of monsters and ugly misfortune.

Bolton men and hounds had come after them, slain by her new companions but time was a luxury she could not afford. Ramsay would come himself soon, a champion of the hunt; as incensed as he was delighted.

Ed Tollet has offered her a raven and assured her of writing implements. Who would she write to? Northern lords whose hands had been stayed by fear, who would even now do Roose Bolton’s bidding still - she could not know which ones to trust.

Littlefinger?

Her mother’s family in the riverlands, swarmed by Lannister armies and Freys?

She was no Northern daughter to them, she was a run-away wife, a traitor’s heir.

There was only Jon, who she must wait for, as she’d waited fruitlessly for Robb to come.

She was not Arya or Bran or Rickon, she thought with a queer lack of pity for herself. Else Jon would have been here already.

Ramsay is coming.

She lowered her arms, curled her hands against the heat in the core of her palms, and kept them still and poised in her lap, the chill shuddering in the rest of her.

_Ramsay is coming._

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

His eyes had been like smoke before but they shine now, his breath trembles out of him, razored and short. He has gone white with terror.

She should not have touched him. His face twists with his own agony before he hurls himself away from her.

She closes her eyes. She does not hear the door open, the shutters lift and creak in their frames. The blizzard keens, her palms are flat over the floor where the rushes are thin, turning to ice. When she does not hear his boots she looks. He is in his corner again, his arms folded over himself, huddled into himself and not looking at her.

She sits up slowly and thinks a moment before pulling the hem to cover her knees again.

"What do you want?"

Her bastard half-brother would never have been so cruel, it cuts her all the same. It's her own fault.

She hadn't believed it when they told her but there had been no reason for them to lie. He'd appeared like a night terror, a cruel taunt, rough and unwashed as a wildling and yet in the shadows of his face still those dark grey eyes. Stark eyes, like Arya and father and she had wanted to weep. She had planned of how she would behave, how she might appeal to him, to make him remember....but the sight of him had hollowed her out. She had had nothing to say to him, nothing to do but beg him back to her.

She deserved his coldness, even his hatred perhaps...but she was still his sister, she had longed and yearned and prayed for him for years, she wanted to hold him and to be held by him.

But he cared nought and she could not cry like a child, instead she said. "I want to go home."

"Then go," he said roughly.

She watched him find his feet, watched him shift with agitation, hand twisting at his sides.

Sansa looked up at him, stubborn and frank. "I can't."

"Why not?"

She stood, shakily to her feet, unsteady in rising and he stepped backward and glared. "Jon, forgive me - "

"It doesn't matter," he said. "The man you knew as your half-brother is no more, you should rejoice."

"I do not rejoice," Sansa said. "I want my brother."

"The wolf king is dead too."

"I should not have been so cold to you, there is nothing I regret more  - "

"Nothing?" he challenged, and it was she who went still. "Why do the Bolton's want you?"

She hadn't spoken a word of her marriage to anyone, Brienne would have fallen on her sword before she dishonoured herself by revealing secrets Sansa had carefully kept. He was no so ignorant as he pretended. Had Ramsay already made his pursuit known? Was news of her marriage known to Jon? Had he known and not cared?

She considered this, considered the cruelty of him making her say it. But Jon wouldn't be...she swallowed and the movement of her throat had his eyes darkening with disdain.

"...I am - I was..." _forced?_ She flinched, _coerced?_ What would he care, would he care? Her words weakened, "I am Ramsay Bolton's wife."

"And who am I to keep a man from his wife?"

She could not speak. Her body slack with shock, emptied by it. For a moment she could not speak, and then anger overtook her, a dread shaking in her stomach, to hear him be so cruel, to sound just like other men.

Jon was not looking at her, stubbornly not seeing. She wanted to shake him, but she was too unsteady herself, her courage muddled up and failing. He stared hard at the floor before speaking. "Did you marry before the weirwood in the old way?"

"Yes - "

"A Bolton is the Warden of the North," he said suddenly. "They will come for you."

"...Yes."

He was silent. She realized frightfully what his silence might mean. Sansa stood before him, hands sprung out by her sides, frozen with horror at the implications, too terrible to speak aloud.

"Jon," she whispered.

"Don't," he snapped, looking into his eyes was like seeing the night burst with lightning. She hadn't been afraid, she'd told herself. Her eyes were wide on him, she couldn't breathe all of a sudden. Something in his face shifted, and she thought for a moment, he sounded as hoarse as she had sounded betrayed. "Don't." He said, and nearly ran her over in his haste to leave the room, his side banged into hers, she nearly caught him, but he twisted away like she was fire, and tore the door wide, disappeared into the howling night, dissipating like smoke.

 

  

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Caitlin Bailey's “Definition Of"
> 
> Hi, anyone who enjoys this fic, I suggest you read the other one I've got on my profile 'a red swollen plum in my mouth (a milkweed full of blood)' - I'm being a bit close-lipped about the premise of the fic and the pairings and how it's gonna progress, but it's pretty much got a similar dark, morally ambiguous fic feel. I can't give too much away but I highly encourage those willing to dip their toes into unusual alternate plots to give it a read. I haven't tagged a pairing, which explains why it's gone under the radar, but I'd really love if you gave it a read!
> 
> also this chapter is shorter than the usual fair, but this felt the best place to cut this chapter off. next chapters will be the usual length.
> 
> thanks to everyone who's been so lovely as to leave a review, they've really made me happy.


	5. except for your eyes, no blade can control me, no sharpened knife

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“I warned you of death,” the red woman says, “will you now discard me?”

“You warned me of her. Now you mean to bring her to me.”

“You came yourself, Jon Snow.”

His teeth clench, his nails bite into his palms.

“You came yourself,” the red woman says, “with no leading from me.”

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“I cannot leave you, my lady.”

“If I am not safe here with my brother, lady Brienne,” Sansa said. “Then where am I safe?”

She couldn’t afford to disbelief it, it did not matter if it wasn’t true. She could not leave the Wall and ride to Littlefinger in the Eyrie, she might have had a chance if Brienne and Pod guarded her the way there, but there were too many dangers, least of all Ramsay prowling the North, looking to snatch her if she fled.

The men who had called her father their Lord Paramount would truss her up and send her back to her husband for fear or to curry favour - whatever it would be for, Sansa could not afford to let her new companions get caught in the crosshairs.

Littlefinger was the architect of this marriage, she remembered. And if she did make it to the howling stones of the Eyrie, what then? This very creature she had called father, called friend, called Petyr. Trusting him had been a mistake, she had felt herself too safe at the time, like a child turning into the skirts of her mother. She had fooled herself.

She had felt herself safe on her family’s lands and been thoroughly disabused of this foolishness. Now here, she _had_ to believe it. She could not go to Littlefinger, she could not leave the Wall, she needed an army, she needed _Jon._

She would win her safety, their army, find their family - Jon was the key to her future. She had not survived all she had to have learnt nothing. He had a duty to their family, she would bring him back to himself and make him hers. He could not send her away.

He would fight her. She had to fight harder and be more shrewd than he.

Her battle here for Jon would take time that she did not have, she needed to utilize Brienne now - another day she dawdled was another day Ramsay gained on her. No, Brienne would go and get her her uncle the Blackfish, if Sansa did fail with Jon, this would be another option.

And if she failed…

"I trust you now with a task of the outmost importance, the North depends upon your success." Sansa made her mouth make the shape perfectly,  benevolent, encouraging. "I trust you above all, Lady Brienne, so promise me that you will keep yourself safe as well - you must survive, I forbid that you let yourself come to harm. Go to my uncle and hasten back. You will see that all your worrying will have been for nought."

Only the future could make them lies, she felt like Littlefinger then - and her mother and even Margaery. She wasn't a fool, though she practised a hope and sweetness that could be taken as faith.

Harmless, only the future could make them lies.

She would know what to do then too.

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He looked at her as man might have looked at something he’d been afraid of as a child, that was to say he refused her, was mistrustful of her, nearly unkind in his regard and yet she drew his eye. As a shadow moving about the room draws the eye of a child fighting sleep.

Jon came and went, hovered and fled. There were talks being had that rankled her to be kept out of, too long had she been discussed as though she were a chest to be inherited and passed around. _No more._

Yet every time she approached him, every time she attempted to enter a room to seek him rather than to simply occupy it, he would storm away.

He likes to watch if he is unseen, does he? She would sometimes think with anger, then calm herself remembering how Jon would be mindful of making himself scarce when he was her unwanted brother,  when they were children too. She would feel a pang of guilt and tell herself she’d had more patience with Sweetrobyn, Jon was her brother, bastard or no - this would need a delicate hand and sweeter tolerance. This couldn’t be rushed, but time was running out.  

She rarely left her rooms beyond these excursions, mindful of the gazes of men. They watched her but seemed too afraid to do more. They were afraid of Jon Snow and wary of his kin, as though the same curse that touched him, flowed through her veins.

With Brienne gone, Ser Davos was kind enough to prove an escort. An old man who had been an advisor to a taciturn king and she, one who had survived kings... He did not trust her, but he had hopes for her nonetheless.

When he invited her to walk the top of the wall, Sansa had no reason to refuse. It had not been long since she’d been reunited with the half-man who said he was not her half-brother. Littlefinger would have expected her to be forming a plan, watching for opportunities, and she had never let herself disappoint him. In the day she could not dwell on hatred or torture herself with his betrayal, she was too astute a student to waste this opportunity, to wallow when she must act.

The freezing gale whipped at her face. Bolstering her furs around her, she carefully did not clutch at Ser Davos’ arm no matter how it seemed that the wall might throw her off.

The Night’s watch had more wildlings than crows. She’d seen transport of grain to the towers, doled out and accounted for by Ed Tollet, there were spearwives who manned those far away places now. The Night’s watch was too weak to fight her battles for her, but the wildlings had built a pyre for Jon Snow, they loved and looked at him as though he were the Father. The red woman waited for him everywhere, Ser Davos not far behind. They trailed him like fussy septas, she’d have laughed if she’d had it in her to.

He was wild as Rickon and as stubborn as Arya, as quick to get away as Bran had been before he’d fallen…

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she offered politely, it was true. The wondrous big-ness of the land ahead of her, she’d never seen so much snow, even in Winterfell, even in the Vale. The sky was downcast, the colour of old stones, she couldn’t tell where the seam between land and sky was.

Ser Davos was in those meetings behind closed doors. “It’s beautiful,” he said, but it was their feet that he watched carefully.

It was dangerous and vast, a storm would bear down upon them, and she didn’t know what would get her first in that razing ice, the cold or Ramsay and his hounds. She thought of the knife in her boot, the bite of it like ice.

She thought of the drop below, Bran, flying fast…

An enveloping, silent whiteness.

And Jon, a black clot, swarming in the blood, eager to stop her heart before it would leave her be.

“What does my brother say, Ser Davos?”

“Doesn’t come here much anymore.”

“Does he no longer care for how it is manned?”

“He trusts the men to man them.” Ser Davos said simply, but its simplicity itself was ominous.

“I’m sure my arrival has inconvenienced him, will he return beyond the wall once he has decided what to do with me?” Sansa mused, grim and irreverent. She saw that it troubled him. “The Boltons  are coming. If the men find out what your lord knows, they will give me up themselves.”

“You speak as though Jon would give you up.”

“I must be prepared for all outcomes,” she lied smoothly. “I must be practical.”

“You would listen to whatever ruling he had?”

“I would have no choice but to obey.”

He knew that too.

But he would not give her up, she told herself. She wouldn’t let him. She would kill herself first. Ser Davos gripped her arm tighter, as though something about her thoughts showed in her mask, and it alarmed him.

“He would not, he would have you away from him – but he would not give you over.”

She had some kindness left in her after all, for not pressing him about how much either of them could believe.

He wanted her to coax her brother’s heart back, but he thought her conniving, a schemer as well. But he relied on that too.

“Jon has been too far from home but no matter what he says, he is still a man - he still has his honour, in his own way. He is still your brother.”

The red woman had told her, pleasure making her trance-like, that Jon had slit the throats of every man and child who had betrayed him. The thought of it made Sansa shiver now, she did not know why. If it was honour, it was a queer honour - like the honour of wild things, the rule of the many toothed and the sharp clawed. She hoped there was some cunning in him as well, so he might survive. Jon was always clever, she knew - quiet and sullen though he was, a bastard had to be clever to survive and then to rise.

If he sent her away…

He couldn't.

When he had crawled in through her window to watch her - what did he mean to watch her do, weep? He looked like a black dog, crouched there, dangerous to her. That had taken cunning, or at the very least some base, cruel curiosity. She didn’t need a brute, she needed Jon Snow her bastard brother.

Ser Davos needed a _King._

Dislike and pity moved through her in a cold, rippling gale. “What do you want me to do, Ser? Speak to him? He will not stay in the same hall as me, he leaves if I take notice of him.” And so she was careful to ignore him as she planned to ambush him, and when she ignored him, when she pretended she had not seen, his gaze was like touch itself, a hand drawing down her spine, like a wall of ice against her back, he watched her and watched her, and left if she showed she felt him. “Jon always knew to do the right thing, but he isn’t himself anymore. If he remembers me it isn’t fondly, I was never particularly close to him. It’s too late now.” she tried to make herself cold, cold as the wind. She looked down at her hands, archly. “We are strangers.”

“He recognizes you.”

“The likeness of a woman who did not want him, and a sister who would not touch him and love him freely. He does not like what he recognizes.”

“Yes,” Ser Davos approved, hopeful enough to make her pity him anew. “You do frighten him, because he can’t pretend he is not who he is around you. You call him back and remind him, it is too painful for him.”

How cruel. When he had the shadow of her father on him, twisted up and strange, making her stomach flip - a Stark look, a Northern man. Yet owing her nothing.

A stranger.

_We are strangers._

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

_And who am I to keep a man from his wife?_

She felt pale and sick to recall it. Jon Snow would never have been so cruel, never mind that they might have never loved each other as well as the rest - he would never have been so unkind, she knew that at least.

He was steel and ice, this man. Slow to smile.

* * *

 

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

A woman once died because he'd chosen duty, here; woman and duty are one and the same.

Honour, nobility... _duty_. These were romances. Romance is always destroyed by brutality and truth, the ugliness of life as it is.

The bitter arguments with the creatures who think themselves his council, he ends them usually by leaving. Her arrival has given these wretched people hope, it burns him how Ser Davos speaks of her - wary, mistrustful, and yet eager to see her do her magic on him. The red woman unnerves her, approaches her if she ever leaves her room. They see her as some means to master him.

He comes and he goes, he leaves in a rage and returns seething. He feels like a wild animal tricked into a leash, fighting it even as the barbs tear into his throat.

He sees the wildings speak to each other, he sees the men of the night's watch observe him and overhears them speaking about the cold and beautiful stranger who has come, they know who she is and pretend not to sometimes. But it will come to a head, he can feel the urgency building. The matter of Sansa Stark is no trifling thing.

If they know her to be a Bolton bride, they will give her away.

Dark-haired Satin keeps the rookery, should a message be sent demanding her return then Ed can keep it from the men a while longer.

But should the banners, the flayed men, that fleshy field of red and pink...should they near the gates, they will abandon the god they thought to make Jon as easily as weak men abandon religion. Fear keeps them in line, but they will not be able to hold against Boltons.

He will not risk men - rapists, thieves, scum of the earth they may be, but their blades were needed for the Wall, to meet the threat that comes.

He will not let them die to keep the Boltons from their prize.

He will  _not._

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

_And who am I to keep a man from his wife?_

 

He would not give her away.

Time slipped past her, like the quick hiss and slither of snakes.

He could not. 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

He returned once, he'd brought more dead things for them to feast upon. He saw her in the mess hall, a rare occurrence. Saw the play of amber and copper in her hair, he watched her eat her soup with a daintiness so fine that he felt all the filth of the world on his own hands. He watched her speak gently to Ed, watched her smile, watched her gently braid the hair of a small wildling child. He watched her and watched her, and when she rose he knew that she had seen.

She meant to make them hers. He did not know who this ghost was, Ygritte and her like would have teased the Sansa of his dreams incessantly, would have made her weep for being such a child, such a haughty little lady - but here she was, speaking with her mother's voice, with a poised gentleness, managing, making them hers. He felt his guts twist is anger, even as his heart burned with a want as nameless as he.

He had not stayed long, he left, still the smell of the kill on him.

Beneath the gate into the wild land of the others, free of people, where he belonged to no one, the red woman stood.

Melisendre tipped her chin, steam rose off her body, warm as she had never been before. Something had refreshed her, something had fed her.

He did not know what, he only knew that he disliked it.

He stopped in front of her, blood still dripping from his cloak. "You are no dead man, Jon Snow."

And it was mirthless, her triumph.

She smiled. "The dead cannot pass."

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

"Please, Jon - " she steps out from behind him before he can sneak off again. "Wait, I have something for you. It'll only take a moment."

His back is hard as stone. It is midday. He's come from Mole town where she knows he's given the Free Folk refuge, she has seen them and they do not seem like raiders then but the cold, hungry dregs that remained of a once fierce force. They’d had an army once but now their warrior leaders lift bowls of soup made from boiling bone marrow to the lips of old women, tend to the weak, malnourished babes and bury the unlucky.

Jon brings them wild game, they'd die otherwise.

He turns half his body toward her when she steps forward, as though to guard his back from some weapon she holds. "It's only gloves," she says gently. "to keep you warm - "

Viper fast, he puts a vise upon her wrist - his fingers so icy it steals a gasp from her. "I don't need your bribes."

Jon Snow was not like her. He was stone as she was stone, but he could not hide the hatred in his eyes. It flared, so black and terrible an emotion that it could not be held gently in all the strength of a mountain.

She tried not to shrink inside of her skin, she thought - she knew, how his dark eyes tracked the racing of her heart, knowing it as closely as though it were a pulse beating in his own throat. "It isn't a bribe," she said softly, then repeated herself more strongly. "It isn't a bribe. The gloves you have in your rooms are worn out, and I've not seen you wearing any either - "

"I am not cold." he bit off the words, his hatred lashing at her.

"You're freezing."

"You think," he jerked her toward him as though she were a child, she tightened her jaw so she would not yelp. "That I think you kind? For giving them blankets, for sewing their clothes, for being sweet to them - do you think me some fool to forget the danger you bring here? To do what you want? That I don't see what you seek to buy with your _kindness?_ "

Her mouth worked into a hard line, "You are grinding my wrist to dust."

It was his words that hurt her, but Jon did not relinquish his hold on her. She was within his guard, only so that he might threaten and frighten her - but she wasn't afraid, she couldn't afford to be. He did not let go. She knew if she touched him now he'd spring away and she might make her escape, but that would let him make his as well. If he thought that she was at his mercy when he held her like this, then all the better for her.

"And I am not kind to them, Jon Snow," she took pleasure in how his eyes narrowed, the thrill of saying this forbidden name. "I mend clothes, I do what I can. You must think me some low creature indeed if you would call that a bribe."

"Those are your weapons, are they not? Favours? Weak, sweet words - _lies_."

He hated that she laughed at him then, she felt the instinctive tightening of his hold, her bones twist and she winced, the bitter mirth turned into a hiss, whistling from between her teeth. "How selfish, you alone want to help them." she glared. "and you are their champion, are you?"

She didn't sneer, but he bore down on her all the same. “I owe them their due.”

“And what do you owe this family?” Sansa demanded coldly. “What of your duty to the Starks, to the North?”

He laughs. “To _you?_ ”

Her face blazes. "You speak of weapons, _Jon Snow._  You with your blade, with your faulty memory - your weakness is the same as any man's, throwing accusations when you are wounded. All you _have_ are lies. I've had no weapons but my tears, my smile, my careful words, my _lying_ kindness. If I am kind, what is it to you? You move about like some ghost and don't speak to me, as though you did not have my future in your hands! I have other weapons you should be grateful I do not _yet_ utilize against your men, who you pretend you hate and yet protect from me - _me!_ I _know_ I am a woman. I have never been allowed to forget that catastrophic  _failing._ Just as you will never forget that you are a bastard. A ruined woman, with a body, with beauty, a cunt - and I have been brutalized for it - I have - Oh... "

He had let her go, sprung her free. He had had the look of drunken rage not long ago but now he dropped her as though she were a hot coal.

Jon Snow had fled. The parcel lay unraveled at her feet, the ice weeping into her stitches.

She did not call him back, speechless.

She marvelled that he had flinched.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

–

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Title from Golden-Mouthed by Andry Kneller

**Author's Note:**

> I took this fic down the first time because the title was an excerpt from a poem which I did not cite in the body of the work, which in technical terms does basically amount to plagiarism. It's serious folks, whether it's song lyrics or christmas jingles I cannot stress enough credit. the. artist.
> 
> The poet to whom the poem belongs contacted me to express their (warranted) dismay, I apologized and in my shame also took the fic down.
> 
> I've put the fic back up because I do intend on writing it after all and re-titled it with one of the alternative different titles I'd originally considered when I first started writing the fic. 'strike hard and true, crow or I'll come back and haunt you' which I think is something Ygritte says to Jon in the books. This is what I've settled on now.
> 
> That's about all the explanation I've got for why I took the fic down in the first place, I've really got such high hopes and goals with this fic and I wanted to continue it but I also hope you can enjoy the[ poem](http://www.fruitapulp.com/2015/05/05/two-poems-by-scherezade-siobhan/) which had contained the title I'd originally (wrongfully) used - it's a lovely poem and linking it here I hope will serve at least some penance.
> 
> First chapter's title is 'shrill click of a cocked gun.' from Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva's Poems for Blok, 1.
> 
> That's all you guys are gonna get from me in so far as author's notes and if you're into supernatural, quasi-incest, morally fucked up plots then well....enjoy!


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